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LORING PARK ASPECTS 




Joseph S. Johnson 

The first white settler in Loring Park 



BRIEF GLIMPSES 

Of Unfamiliar 

LORING PARK ASPECTS 

WHEREIN an Account is given of Interest- 
ing and Memorable Events which have 
hapned in this Valley, with Agreeable In- 
quirendoes into the lives of Certain of its 
Pioneers to which is Appended a Chapter of 
More Flippant Sort (Composed for the 
Lighter-Minded) having to do with the 
Pleasant Adventures of One Dad Hough- 
ton, the Whole Most Diverting to the 
Reader. 

By 
A. J. RUSSELL OF FOURTH STREET 



15. As for man, his days are as grass j 

1 6 . For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone ; . 

17. But— . . . —Psalm CIII 



MINNEAPOLIS 

PRINTED at the Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, for 
Leonard H. Wells, Publisher, and are to be sold at 
Powers' Book Section, L. H. Wells, Manager, 
Marquette Avenue and Fifth Street, Kitty-Corner- 
ing from the First and Security National Bank 
Building. 1919. 



y, 



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TO 

herschell v. jones 

"jonesey" 

booklover and book collector napoleonic 

once old reportorial comrade 

now the boss 

yet full of faith and good works 

solicitous to do good 

and to make this a better world 

to those in his employ 

generous beyond belief 

but whose politics i deplore 

this slight effort 

IS 
WARMLY DEDICATED 



O I am but a symbol and a dream 

Moving along the minds of those who sleep — 

Echo of laughter heard phantastically ! 
And ever through the misty pageant gleam 

Faces I knew, and tender eyes that keep 

Remembrance of some old reality. 

-Leslie Nelson Jennings 



PREFATORY NOTE 

ONE hundred years ago, on August 24, 
18 19, Fort S netting was established at the 
confluence of the Mississippi and Minne- 
sota rivers. With this anniversary in mind, and 
in order somewhat to relieve a too strained atten- 
tion upon the one subject of thought and conver- 
sation of long, dark days, I have for a year or 
more worked at odd moments of busily occupied 
weeks, and often during the evening and on quiet 
Sunday afternoons, on a brief history of the 
urban valley at the foot of the hills of the Lowry 
range that crosses the city of Minneapolis about 
a mile from the Mississippi river. Accuracy and 
historical research, while they have not been 
avoided, have not been primarily sought, but the 
attempt has been made to obtain old time flavors 
and aspects. The only real fiction is found in 
Section VI. In the other sections, the curtain of 
the past has, perhaps, been pulled aside at one of 
its corners for a moment from a darkening stage 
for brief glimpses of scenes in the rapidly shifting 
panorama of the Loring Park valley. 

I have hoped sometimes, and especially since 
the location of the Public Library building has 
been decided, that this slight sketch might help to 



12 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

persuade the people of this city, through their 
Park Board, to acquire the necessary two remain- 
ing blocks between Hennepin and Lyndale Ave- 
nues, blocks that separate the Parade and Loring 
Park, and so open up forever this beautiful valley 
to the public use and enjoyment. It would not 
be necessary at once to wreck the fine buildings 
that now occupy these two key blocks, for in 
twenty-five or in fifty years, before they wear 
out, they will themselves pay for the entire im- 
provement. The city has all the time there is 
and fifty years in the history of this valley is but 
a moment. 

Then, too, there is another consideration, 
doubtless a foolish one, in writing such little 
books as "Fourth Street" and "Loring Park As- 
pects," and that is the thought, too egotistical 
perhaps, that a few of the book collectors of 
1950, of 1995, or even of the year 2019, as happy 
in their searches of the old bookstores, attics, and 
old furniture stores of their days as we have been 
in similar pursuits in ours, may stumble upon a 
yellow, dusty, but fairly preserved copy of "Lor- 
ing Park Aspects," and bear it joyfully away to 
their shelves. 

At such a consummation, my happy and flat- 
tered ghost would knock three mighty raps on 
the asphalt of Fourth Street or upon the iron 
work of the Loring Park bridge and then - off to 
fresh fields and paradises new. 

A. J. R. 
December 1, 1918 



CONTENTS 

I The Last Indian . . . 21 

II The First White Settlers . 38 

III Waste Paper Basket of Memories 68 

IV The Indians . . . . 91 
V The Lost Brook . . . 114 

VI "Dad Houghton" of the Plaza 132 

VII Camping Out in Heaven . . 162 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Joseph S. Johnson . . . Frontispiece 

Loring Park Region in 1874 . . 20 

Mrs. Joseph S. Johnson ... 25 

Sara Johnson (Mrs. Paul A. Pierce) 31 

Etta and George Jewett ... 49 

Oliver C. Gray 61 

Olive Francis Barton (Mrs. A. B. 

Barton) 65 

C. M. Loring in 1864 ... 71 

Mrs. C. H. Wiltberger ... 77 

The Simple Elegance of the Fifties 81 

The Bridge over the Ravine . . 87 

Indian Trails in Minneapolis . 97 
The Mystery Pictures . . . 142-143 

Camp Comfort 170 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 



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THE LAST INDIAN 

NINETEEN grandmothers, placed 
agewise, would reach back to a 
time when Jesus walked the shores of 
Gennesaret And the life of the near- 
est of these grandmothers would cover 
the period when the last Indian was 
making his home in Loring Park. 

This seemingly irreverent metaphor, 
though in truth it is not so intended, 
may, perhaps, need elaboration. Grand- 
mothers there are undoubtedly, and 
many of them, who grow and ripen in 
years and in practical wisdom, even to 
the great age of one hundred. If we 
may be permitted to use them -though 
with every respect and veneration -to 
measure the stretch of the long thread 
of time, we may picture to ourselves 
more vividly this narrow span of years 
as it reaches from our brief day back to 



22 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

the notable events in the history of this 
planet. 

Letting one venerable ancestress rep- 
resent a century, we find that it requires 
but nineteen grandmothers laid in a 
line, end to end, feet of one to the head 
of the next, to reach back to the begin- 
ning of the Christian Era. And if we 
walk or perhaps saunter, as we purpose 
doing here, towards the past along this 
line of grandmothers, we find that we 
do not pass the first one in the series, 
before we come upon the last Indian 
still living in Loring Park, now the 
very center and heart of Minneapolis. 

It would hardly seem possible on 
first consideration that one interested 
in the history and romance of Loring 
Park at this late day could discover the 
name of its last Indian. For the ab- 
origines impressed the pioneers much 
as did the moss and lichens of the an- 
cient trees of the Big Woods, and they 
were considered of no more impor- 
tance. The poetical or artistic person 
of those days gave them a glance, and 
the missionary or the trader tried to 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 23 

interest them in schemes of salvation 
or of barter, but otherwise they were 
looked upon as "of no use" and their 
histories and records, which they car- 
ried in their minds only, were neg- 
lected. 

Yet no great difficulty was found in 
bringing to light again the name of the 
last Indian who lived in this park, or 
in discovering the name of the first 
white settler who "took it up" from the 
government and placed it under culti- 
vation for the first time in the history 
of the world. We are all so young and 
so new to this section, that there are 
those still living who have seen and 
talked with this last Indian as he 
camped beside the Loring Park lake, 
and who have not only shaken hands 
with the first white settler, but have 
actually had their winter's supplies of 
potatoes from him. 

We owe to Mr. W. H. Grimshaw 
our acquaintance with Keg-o-ma-go- 
shieg whose wigwam was "on the site 
of Fred Boardman's house" at the cor- 
ner of Oak Grove and Fifteenth Streets, 



24 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

just south of the park. In the fifties 
Mr. Grimshaw with his parents came 
to Hennepin Avenue, where the present 
Plaza Hotel now stands, to make his 
home. As a boy naturally would, he 
took notice of the delightful wilderness 
around him on every side and he re- 
members vividly the old Indian camp- 
ing by the lake. He learned from the 
neighborhood gossip and then from the 
Indian himself that his name was Keg- 
o-ma-go-shieg and that his ancestors had 
lived on this spot for generations. This 
section of the country west of the Mis- 
sissippi had come under the control of 
the Government, and the Indians were 
gone. But led by his love for the spot 
of his birth, this last Loring Park In- 
dian was accustomed to return in the 
summer time and camp here to renew 
his acquaintance with this beloved val- 
ley, to fish in its lakes and to hunt the 
wild game of its hills and meadows. 
Tall, athletic, splendid in bearing, car- 
rying a powerful six-foot bow with its 
tough deerskin thong, Keg-o-ma-go- 
shieg was a mighty figure in boyish 





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Mrs. Joseph S. Johnson 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 27 

imaginations. He was asked one day 
if he could shoot an arrow across the 
lake. A look of contempt passed over 
the Indian's face. He drew his arrow 
to the tip and sent it flying over the 
water. 

"Look in door of spring-house," he 
said. 

The boys scurried around to the oth- 
er side of the lake and found the flint 
head of the arrow driven to the shoul- 
der in the door of the spring-house erect- 
ed on the eastern rim of the lake by the 
first white settler of Loring Park, Jo- 
seph S. Johnson, for the purpose of 
keeping his cream and butter sweet. 

In the absence of greater historical 
figures or of events of national moment, 
this last Indian in the park becomes of 
obvious value to us. Reverently as 
possible, I have stood near "the site of 
Fred Boardman's house" -as near as 
one might today without being looked 
upon in the light of a possible porch- 
climber -closed my eyes to the present 
and reconstructed the ancient forest and 
the ancestral tepees of the Keg-o-ma- 



28 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

go-shieg tribe. No tablet marks the 
spot and no one cares anything about 
this important matter. 

Yet there are tablets and monuments 
in Loring Park that are more bewild- 
ering to the mind than would be a bit 
of bronze indicating the site of Keg-o- 
ma-go-shieg's wigwam. A tablet that 
has to do with the Battle of Fort Gris- 
wold has been erected by a local chap- 
ter of Daughters. I asked Edward A. 
Bromley, the historian, just where in 
the park Fort Griswold stood. He in- 
dicated, rather too cheerfully, I felt, a 
spot at the corner of Willow and Fif- 
teenth Streets. I learned later that he 
was mistaken. Fort Griswold is in 
Connecticut on the Thames River op- 
posite New London. Loring Park can 
make little claim to a share in the glory 
of the soldiers who fought there. But 
whatever claim we can make, our bit 
of bronze does make. 

The statue of Ole Bull looks musi- 
cally down on Harmon Place from the 
northern exposure of Loring Park. 
Just what interest the park has in this 



LP RING PARK ASPECTS 29 

great artist, it is difficult to discover. 
Sitting Bull standing there would be 
more easily understood. 

Many other places of real historical 
interest besides Keg-o-ma-go-shieg's 
wigwam site remain unmarked in this 
valley. A well traveled Indian trail, 
narrow and beaten six or eight inches 
deep by the tread of countless genera- 
tions of Indian feet, passed through it 
from the Calhoun Indian village to the 
Falls. The Park Board has not indi- 
cated this old trail, but it is possible to 
re-locate it from Mr. Pond's map of 
the old site in 1834 and from the mem- 
ories of Mr. Grimshaw who has walked 
over it. Today not a trace of it can 
be found in the soil, though I have 
sought it carefully and with tears. 

And Mr. Grimshaw tells us also of 
the vast clouds of passenger pigeons, 
with their long cuneate tails of twelve 
tapering feathers, wing coverts with 
black spots, party-colored tail feathers 
and iridescent necks. In the migrating 
season they roosted in millions in the 
trees back of the park. In the after- 



3 o LORING PARK ASPECTS 

noon a dark cloud would appear on the 
western horizon like a great storm- 
cloud coming up. Soon the heavens 
would be entirely covered by these mi- 
grating birds so that the day was dark- 
ened. The air was filled with the noise 
of their wings like the sound of waters. 
They would alight on the trees in great 
swarms, breaking down the branches 
by their mass and weight. But like the 
buffalo they have gone forever. 

Then there was the old brook that 
flowed out of the Loring Park lake, ran 
across Harmon Place under the auto- 
mobile buildings and out again and 
across Hennepin Avenue towards Bas- 
sett's Creek into which it emptied. 
This ancient valley I have traced, walk- 
ing over it with Frank Wiltberger who 
played on its banks in his youth and I 
have tried to reconstruct the splendid 
landscape from his descriptions. 

And through this section, roughly 
along Hennepin Avenue, ran the old 
military road from the Falls to Fort 
Ridgely and beyond. And the old 
Johnson farm-house stood here. Why 
does its site remain unmarked? 




Sara Johnson (Mrs. Paul A. Pierce) 

Who was born in the Park 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 33 

A cousin of the Johnson children, 
who often visited them and played 
about the fields and woods of her 
uncle's farm, paints this pleasant pic- 
ture of her memories of the spot as it 
was then: 

I recall how, with my cousins, I flew over 
that marsh, long curls streaming in the wind, an 
Indian following and threatening to cut them 
off. I see the red tufts of the Indian paint 
brush that dotted the slopes, and the tawny glory 
of the wild tiger lilies, swaying on their slender 
stalks among the tall meadow grasses. Can the 
stiff battalions of the Park Board's flaming can- 
nas and gladioli make up for that wild grace? 

Joseph S. Johnson came from Farm- 
ington, Maine, in 1854. He is de- 
scribed as "quite a fine looking man, 
large in size, with benevolent features, 
wavy, abundant gray hair, rather retir- 
ing, and a man who made little noise 
in the world." He was a staunch Dem- 
ocrat and a famous gardener. His 
house was on the knoll back of the 
present structure used by the skaters as 
a "warming-house." It stood about on 
the site of the present flag staff. The 
garden extended down the slope be- 



34 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

tween Willow Street and the Play- 
ground. 

The homes of Mr. Johnson's daugh- 
ter, Mrs. E. P. Wells, and of two of his 
grandchildren, Mr. Stuart Wells and 
Mrs. Charles Ireys on Groveland 
Avenue, all stand on the land of the old 
farm. 

The old farm-house, the spring- 
house, the ancient Indian trail, the 
brook and its flowery valley, the Mili- 
tary Road, the Indians -all are gone 
and the Loring Park region, covered 
with churches, institutions, schools, li- 
braries, art galleries, and stately homes, 
is rapidly becoming a great civic cen- 
ter. Civic centers, like poets, are born, 
not made and we ought to recognize 
them when they appear. After they 
have once defined themselves, the in- 
terest in them becomes profound. This 
urban valley comprising the Parade 
and Loring Park has become one of the 
city's great centers, even if it is not the 
official civic center placed on our as- 
tonished maps by experts imported 
from abroad. What another hundred 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 35 

years may do in the way of civic centers 
we may conjecture if we have "time to 
let." But today a natural center is de- 
veloping before our eyes in this old 
valley upon which we look down from 
Lowry Hill, at which we wonder and 
over whose future we dream dreams. 
As we look down from the heights of 
Lowry Hill we ask ourselves what has 
been happening in this splendid spot of 
ground since the dawn of history and 
in the long, dark night before that 
dawn? What was going on here be- 
fore man trod the globe? What did 
the place look like in the geological 
eras when the great river ran down the 
Bassett's Creek basin, across Bryn 
Mawr and so on south by way of the 
Lake of the Isles and Lakes Calhoun 
and Harriet to its juncture with the 
Minnesota? What was the appear- 
ance of this spot and what was happen- 
ing here when Noah sailed and when 
Abraham led his flocks in the desert? 
What was doing in this wild garden of 
the Lord when Jesus sat alone in Geth- 
semane, when the barons forced King 



36 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

John to sign Magna Carta, when the 
Pilgrims landed on the rock, when 
Washington was taking the presidential^ 
oath in New York, when Fort Snelling 
was established in 1819, and when the 
land of this park itself was first "taken 
up" from the government of the Unit- 
ed States "in the fifties" and became the 
farm of Joseph S. Johnson? 

If we are walking through the park 
every day on the way to work, we ought 
to know more about it. So enormous- 
ly interesting a stage setting is it that I 
have been trying to trace out some of its 
history. My interest in it all was 
aroused by an old resident of the valley, 
one who had in fact first attached him- 
self to the planet here, when he re- 
marked casually one day on the street- 
car as we passed over the spot, "Here 
is where the old brook used to flow. 
The bridge across Hennepin Avenue 
was at this spot." "What brook," I 
asked, "and what bridge?" Then he 
told at length of the fine stream that 
once drained Johnson's Lake, flowing 
across Harmon Place and Hennepin 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 37 

Avenue and emptying into Bassett's 
delightful "crick." 

. So I began to ask questions about 
this Lost Brook, about Johnson's Lake 
and about the family that gave it its 
name. Many things are still discover- 
able, but more are lost. The old swamp 
and "Barber's pasture" on the western 
side of Hennepin Avenue are gone. 
There is nothing here now but the 
great public field called the Parade 
and, surrounding it, cathedrals, hotels, 
the growing Dunwoody Institute, the 
Armory, and the Northrop School. 
Mr. Johnson, could he come back and 
cast an astonished eye on his old farm 
where he toiled and lived, would never 
recognize the place under its present 
aspect. All he would see would be a 
thousand automobiles trying to run 
over him, great cathedrals and church- 
es, libraries and splendid homes. But 
the old countryside, with the weeds in 
the corners of the fences, and the mud- 
dy roads, and the brook sluggishly 
curling its way from the marshes and 
ponds that are now Loring Park -they 
are gone. 



II 

THE FIRST WHITE SETTLERS 

ONE hundred and sixty acres of 
land, comprising a portion of the 
present Loring Park, was conveyed by 
patent from the United States to Jo- 
seph Smith Johnson, who paid $1.25 
an acre for it, on January 19, 1856. So 
he became legally the first white set- 
tler in Loring Park. 

It is of interest to trace the claims 
that have been made to the ownership 
of this spot of land. Mr. Johnson ob- 
tained title from the United States. 
The United States bought it of France 
in 1803 m tne Louisiana Purchase. 
France claimed it from exploration and 
colonization. Before that time Spain 
laid claim to the continent, including 
Loring Park, from Columbus' discov- 
ery. Before Columbus, were the Ab- 
orgines. 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 39 

The Indians did not bother them- 
selves to assert personal ownership to 
land. They assumed that the Great 
Spirit intended it for the common good. 
The United States recognized a certain 
Indian ownership in the land, however, 
and went through the forms of purchas- 
ing it from them. 

Joseph S. Johnson, the first white 
man to get a clear title to the essential 
park, was a State of Maine Yankee and 
a Democrat. As this is my own birth 
and creed political, I am convinced 
that when you find this unusual com- 
bination, you find an astute personage. 
Mr. Johnson had been "around the 
Horn" with the gold seekers of Cali- 
fornia in 1849, but had returned to 
Maine where he heard from his broth- 
er-in-law, Samuel A. Jewett, the news 
of the coming opening of the Indian 
reservation at Fort Snelling and the 
Falls of St. Anthony. 

The survey of the original township 
of Minneapolis, not then so called, was 
made in 1854, the reservation was re- 
duced in 1855, and Mr. Jewett selected 



4 o LORING PARK ASPECTS 

the one hundred and sixty acres that 
was filed on by Mr. Johnson on April 
21, 1855, an( l t0 which he obtained a 
patent on January 16, 1856. 

The white men began "jumping 
claims" on this reservation in 1849 and 
1850, or were given permission by the 
officers at the fort to hold down claims 
for services, but most of the "sooners" 
were driven off by the soldiers or were 
bought out by those who were ready 
and waiting to file when the time came. 

Mr. Johnson's "hundred and sixty" 
was bounded as follows: The north 
line ran from the corner of Nicollet 
Avenue and Grant Street, down Grant 
Street across the park near the present 
bridge to the corner of Lyndale Aven- 
ue and Kenwood Parkway; thence 
south, to the corner of Lyndale and 
Franklin Avenues; thence east, to the 
corner of Franklin and Nicollet Aven- 
ues; thence north, to the aforesaid cor- 
ner of Nicollet and Grant Street. 

Thus it comprised the southern por- 
tion of Loring Park, including the 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 41 

larger lake, and the high ridge to the 
south of it. 

The north half of the park was 
granted by patent to Allen Harmon on 
the same day, January 19, 1856. Mr. 
Harmon had filed on his claim on May 
l 7) 1855. His south line was Mr. 
Johnson's north line, from the corner 
of Nicollet Avenue and Grant Street 
to the corner of Lyndale Avenue and 
Kenwood Boulevard; thence north, to 
the corner of Chestnut and Lyndale 
Avenues north; thence east, to a point 
a short distance from the corner of 
Ninth Street north and Hawthorn 
Avenue ; thence south, back to the cor- 
ner of Nicollet and Grant Street. 

Harmon Place, very properly, was 
named for Allen Harmon who was a 
deacon of the Free Will Baptist 
Church. Mary Place was named for 
Mary Harmon, his wife. Colonel 
Stevens in his "Reminiscences" tells us 
something about Deacon Harmon : 

During the fall of 1851, our side of the river 
received a valuable addition in the person of 



42 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

Allen Harmon, who, with his family, came from 
Maine. He was a man of great worth, and we 
were pleased to have him for a neighbor, though 
not a very near one, as his claim was back some 
distance from the river. He continually resid- 
ed on it from a few days after the commanding 
officer at the fort granted him permission to take 
it until his death some five years ago (1885). 
He had laid it all out into building lots. 

Colonel Stevens did not consider 
Deacon Harmon a very near neighbor, 
for his home was far back from the 
river, at the corner of Hennepin Aven- 
ue and Thirteenth Street. It was far 
out in the country. Deacon Harmon's 
eldest daughter, Lucy Harmon, mar- 
ried C. K. Sherburne, sexton of the 
Free Will Baptist Church, whose house 
occupied the lot on Fourth Street 
where the Phoenix Building and the 
Metropolitan Theater now stand. He 
"conducted a grocery store" on Henne- 
pin Avenue, "between the Pence Opera 
House and the store occupied by T. K. 
Gray." 

In picturing this valley as it must 
have been when it was farming land, 
we are fortunate in having the mem- 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 43 

ories of some of those who saw it in its 
original beauty. Henrietta Jewett 
Keith, daughter of Samuel A. Jewett 
and a cousin of the Johnson children, 
tells this fascinating story of these old 
days: 

In 1854, Samuel A. Jewett, professor of lan- 
guages in East Tennessee University, came up 
the Mississippi River for a vacation trip. Like 
the spies who visited Canaan, he was ravished by 
the beauty of the new land and straightway flung 
down syntax for the woodman's ax. Hastily 
gathering together his Lares and Penates in Ten- 
nessee, including a wife and several small chil- 
dren, he brought them up the Mississippi River 
on the big side-wheel steamboat "Grey Eagle" 
to St. Paul, thence by a Concord four-horse stage 
to St. Anthony's Falls, placed them in the only 
vacant house in the town, while he stayed not to 
see what would happen, but, with an Indian 
guide and a belt around his waist full of gold 
pieces, went off into the wilderness to enter pine 
lands. 

In this same year, Mr. Jewett preempted from 
the United States Government at $1.25 an acre, 
one hundred and sixty acres, holding it for his 
brother-in-law, Joseph S. Johnson, till he should 
arrive. Mr. Johnson's land included a portion 
of our Loring Park of today, with the high bluff 
south of it, now Oak Grove Street, Clifton, 
Groveland, and Ridgewood Avenues. The West 



44 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

Side was a goodly land and fair, and greatly to 
be desired. It had not then been released by the 
Government for entry and the tales told of rival 
claims, fierce fights for possession of some choice 
tract, would joy Bret Harte. Although fortu- 
nate in holding the Johnson claim undisturbed, 
Mr. Jewett was not so lucky for himself. He 
came home one night to find his own claim on 
Bassett's Creek occupied by a squatter in a has- 
tily built shanty thrown together with a few 
boards. Rather than fight, he paid the squatter 
for his "rights" and occupied the shanty himself. 
In due time the Johnson family arrived and 
took possession of a little white house whose 
site is now marked by the flagstaff on the knoll 
in the park. These were the pioneers of Loring 
Park, the pushing pawns of its future greatness. 
The little white house on the hill saw many 
changes, even in its own lease of life, before it 
was moved off for the making of our city's 
beauty spot. When it was built, the nearest 
neighbor was Deacon Allen Harmon whose claim 
was due north. There was but a baker's dozen 
of houses on this side of the river, which had not 
then been bridged though Captain Tapper's 
ferry-boat was running. There was no Minne- 
apolis, only broad, rolling prairies, and oak open- 
ings. But they had wide vision, these pioneers, 
and Hope, that Circe of adventurers, singing her 
siren song, came with them, and Expectation 
stood on tiptoe, lifting confident eyes to the 
future. 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 45 

It seems a wonderful leap from the few log 
cabins or claim shanties of rough boards to the 
magnificent buildings, the costly churches, the 
elegant and luxurious homes of this city of half 
a million people, the more wonderful that it has 
happened in the lifetime of the children of that 
day. It is like Aladdin's lamp. But even then, 
those brave pioneer spirits dreamed that dream 
and saw, across the hazel brush pastures as in a 
beautiful mirage, the domes and spires of today. 

The pioneers were practical folk and had little 
time or money to spend on frills. For example, 
the Johnson kitchen, instead of the front door, 
faced the lake. And no wonder, for the water 
supply in winter was obtained by melting great 
blocks of ice on the back of the kitchen stove, 
and in summer it was handier to the spring- 
house for the frequent trips after the milk and 
butter kept there, as well as the cool drinking 
water. Wonderful living springs feeding the 
little lake were among the desirable features in 
the selection of the homestead. So the view was 
from the kitchen, the most important part of the 
house then. 

Those New England women were past grand- 
masters of cooking and the good things that is- 
sued from that kitchen were contrived in spite 
of many missing links in supplies. Fresh meat 
was unknown except when some stray hunter 
brought in venison or bear steak. We "put 
down" our own barrel of pork in the cellar for 
meat. And the farmer must have his own cows 



46 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

or hens or he went without milk and eggs. Nev- 
ertheless babies lived and thrived and are the 
sturdy grandparents today of the babies that 
must have their special foods, with whose prep- 
aration under the strict surveillance of the baby 
specialist no other function of life may interfere. 
Cookies and doughnuts for the children were 
not taboo then, nor mince pies, though they 
were made with cranberries, picked by the In- 
dians, in lieu of apples. The town was not dry 
either, and the cooks were generous with the 
"oh-be-joyful." We had real New Orleans 
molasses to put in them too, a clear, brown 
amber nectar, fit for the gods; and brown 
sugar, unadulterate. Happy children, to spread 
thick slices - no thin modern shavelings - of sweet 
home bread and butter, generous as those spread 
by Charlotte to assuage the sorrows of Werther, 
with a top layer of that delectable brown sugar, 
moist and rich with the unadulterated juices of 
the cane, sweeter than honey from Hymettus, 
and with a flavor of Cuban sunshine and hooped 
casks. Canned goods were unknown, but could 
any brand of Oneida corn or Country Gentleman 
equal in succulent richness the sweet corn our 
mothers spread on sheets on the shed roof and 
dried in the clear sunshine. Wild blackberries 
"in tumbling clusters," and wild gooseberries, 
we children were set to stem. These latter, 
made into "gooseberry fool," furnished a dish 
for which the gods might languish. Then there 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 47 

were cranberries from "our marsh"; strawberries 
cool from under their green leaves, scarlet, ador- 
able, sweet as those plucked on Pincian hills; 
wild plums, that, preserved in a clear, scarlet 
syrup, carried still in their pungent flavor the 
breath of those white, perfumed thickets whose 
May springtime had given them birth. 

We had a "spare chamber," though the chil- 
dren had to be poked under the big "four-poster" 
in a "trundle bed" to compass it. The boys had 
a bed in the open space at the head of the stairs. 
The spare room was sacred to company. When 
even that was overflowed, as when there were 
several ministers billeted on us, beds were made 
up on the floor for the family. But joyfully we 
children gave up our beds for the pallet on the 
floor, for we knew what goodies were brought 
out for Brother Smith and Brother Jones. We 
knew that there would be damson sweet pickles, 
brandied peaches, and great golden blocks of 
sponge cake, artfully alternated in the big silver 
cake basket with squares of black fruit cake, 
heavy with frosting, aromatic with spices. And 
then the high glass bowl would be brought down 
from the top shelf and filled with Floating Is- 
land, a creamy yellow sea, with islands of 
whipped foam. We did not murmur at the 
long grace, more like a prayer, which as Lamb 
says, was as "indispensable as the napkin." 

How can I crowd and press into one brief 
chapter the recollection of those early days. The 



48 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

faces I loved are there, the voices I remember. 
We are dancing, singing, scampering all over the 
meadow and bluff-side. 

The Johnson farm yielded most of the family 
living. On the slope of the knoll, and back of 
the present rest-house, was the garden, for Mr. 
Johnson was a famous gardener and nearly al- 
ways the victor in friendly contests with his 
relatives as to the first green pease and new 
potatoes. One favorable season he produced a 
fine crop of Jersey sweet potatoes on that sandy 
slope. A picture of Mr. Johnson, in blue jeans 
overalls and big straw hat, swinging the long 
scythe or pitching the hay from the marsh into 
fragrant cocks, is vivid in my memory. He had 
large, benevolent features and a most kindly 
blue eye. I remember his wavy, abundant gray 
hair and winning smile. He was a staunch 
Democrat and the party could do no wrong. 
His neighbors were Republicans and political 
discussion was lively. Mrs. Johnson was dis- 
tinguished in manner, with all the gentle breed- 
ing and courtesy of the Cranford ladies. 

The marshy meadow and the steep bluff 
formed the great playground for the Johnson and 
the Jewett children in the years before neigh- 
bors came. Infinite were the possibilities of 
those mysterious wooded tangles of the great 
bluff. And sometimes Indians put a fine edge 
on the enjoyment. A band of Chippewas camped 
every summer on the high ground, coming down 
to the lake to fish and appearing at the kitchen 




Etta and George Jewett 

Playmate cousins of the Johnson children 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 51 

door with presents of a black bass or a pickerel, 
said presents having a market value of bills re- 
ceivable, in the shape of kerosene, flour, salt pork, 
or potatoes. Indians were common enough then 
and even the children were not usually afraid, 
though on one occasion a young Indian gave 
chase to one of us, making motions to cut off 
with his knife the long curls flying in the wind 
as fear lent wings to her feet. 

At another time when the Jewett family was 
on its way to the Johnson home for the Christ- 
mas dinner, the trip being made in a big box 
sled and all the children huddled on the bottom 
under buffalo robes, some young Indians sprang 
out from behind the trees in Oak Park, with 
loud whoops and threatening gestures. But these 
were only the mad pranks of youthful spirits 
and nobody minded them. One could never tire 
watching the squaws, sometimes with flowers 
pinned on unspeakably dirty inner garments, or 
of hearing them singing queer lullabies to the 
bright-eyed papooses. This, of course, was be- 
fore the Indian outbreak of the sixties. 

To the pioneer women, "help" was a thing 
that money could not buy. Reaching home from 
one of his exploring trips in the pine woods at 
nightfall, Mr. Jewett once brought with him an 
Indian boy to help in the housework. Diligent 
search in the morning failed to reveal the faintest 
trace of the boy, whose lack of enthusiasm in 
"doing up the dishes" and his reluctance to offi- 
ciate as a hewer of wood and drawer of water 



52 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

had sent him back to the wilderness and his 
blanket. Indians have ever been "anti's" and 
have maintained the male supremacy. 

It is worth recalling, perhaps, that at one 
Christmas, under the plate of the four-weeks-old, 
visiting baby, was a deed to Lot W, in Johnson's 
Addition. Thus early were additions and real 
estate men. A portion of the lot, years after- 
ward, paid the expenses of the baby's two year 
stay in Europe. But even that comes short of 
indicating the magical rise in values of the John- 
son farm. 

It is worth recording, too, that to these 
children was given the first Christmas tree in 
Minneapolis. The tree was cut by one of them, 
a boy of ten years, on the river bank, with the 
thermometer standing at forty degrees below 
zero. This statement may be verified by re- 
ferring to the files of the Minnesota Republican 
for the year 1855. The tree was lit with tallow 
dips set in small square wooden blocks and a 
large center table had to be removed to make 
room for it. 

The gifts were purchased in St. Anthony at 
Wales' book-store, then a household word. A 
pair of wonderfully colored glass birds on a wire 
spring, perched on an incredibly green toy tree, 
is still preserved under a glass case. To Wales' 
book-store we looked for rare copies of Harper's 
or Godey's Ladies' Book. And what joy when 
there was a new novel by Charles Dickens! 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 53 

Brought up in the straightest of straight- jacket 
ideas as to novels, my whole acquaintance with 
fiction until my twelfth year was Home Influ- 
ence, by Grace Aguilar, and Fredericka Bremer s 
Home, selected, probably, because of the au- 
thor's visit to these wilds, when frightened and 
trembling she crossed the Mississippi in an In- 
dian dugout. These works adorned the parlor 
table and were regarded as innocuous. 

Then, one red letter day, came into our house- 
hold like a stream of yellow sunlight, Eliza 
Cahill, sister of William F. Cahill-one of the 
first Minneapolis millers - and opened heaven. 
She was an ardent devotee of Thackeray and 
Dickens. The charm of her bright wit, the 
gleam of her Irish gray eye, "the grayest of all 
things blue, the bluest of all things gray," brushed 
swiftly away those cobwebs of musty prejudice 
and almost before anybody knew it, The New- 
comes in black, beloved boards and Bleak House, 
formerly hid between the mattresses, were house- 
hold words. 

We brought with us, too, in the hold of the 
"Grey Eagle" the first piano in West Minne- 
apolis, a harpsichord, that, before the river voy- 
age, had crossed the seas from France. The 
quaint relic now sings low, very low, in the Ard 
Godfrey House of the Pioneers' Association. 

Shall I ever forget the astounding news 
brought by C. A. Widstrand, the first music 
teacher of Minneapolis, when he came to give 



54 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

a lesson to the small fingers, that the new Sus- 
pension Bridge, pride of our hearts, had blown 
over in the night? 

And now we have neighbors. Friendly lights 
cheer the dark of winter nights. The hospitable 
walls of "The Grays" rise white among the 
trees, and the narrow path through the meadow 
and up the blufl side is widened by the passing of 
friendly footsteps. What joy, to "sup with a 
friend and go by lantern home," through the 
bushes and trees of what is now Oak Grove 
Street and Clifton Avenue. The white house of 
the Grays, though girt about with many addi- 
tions, still stands on the original spot and is still 
the family home. 

T. K. Gray's drug store still does business at 
its original stand on Bridge Street, now 108 
Hennepin Avenue. Oliver Gray was our first 
teacher and his school was in a new store build- 
ing, now the corner of First Street and First 
Avenue S. I can see now, the wonderful pyra- 
mid bouquets that adorned the desk of this Adon- 
is among school teachers, devoted tokens brought 
by the big girls, their splendor built up, tier 
after tier, with brilliant wild phlox, tiger lilies, 
butter- and-eggs, and jimweed. The engineering 
skill developed by the big girls in piloting their 
hoop skirts safely between the crowded desks 
made a deep impression on my mind. We 
thought nothing, having no street-cars, of walk- 
ing a mile or two to school, though in winter, 
Deacon Harmon, Deacon Jewett, and Brother 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 55 

Johnson would drive up with their bob-sleds and 
take aboard all who lived anywhere along their 
road. Even now my throat tightens, as I recall 
the small girl, by some chance missed out from 
the load, running weeping after the vanishing 
bells, stumbling in the deep, cold snow, not half 
as cold as her cold little heart. 

One day, one of the boys circulated an excit- 
ing whisper that "the Indians were in town." 
There was a swift, though silent, exodus, nor 
was there any return, for we spent the rest of the 
day in admiring attendance on the Indians, and 
at night we escorted them to their camp on 
Hoag's Pond. 

Hoag's Pond! How many memories cluster 
about its classic shores. There we built rafts 
and caught frogs, and built great bonfires to 
skate by. As we grew older, the bonfires were 
sometimes less attractive than the shadowy cor- 
ners and thickets that skirted the shore. 

// the bonfire got too warm, then a strong and 
manly arm, 
Steered her to a friendly corner — far enough, 
And her little feet would slide closer, closer to 
his side 
And a little hand steal from a friendly muff. 

Charles Hoag, for whom the pond was named, 
also gave to Minneapolis its musical and rhythmi- 
cal name. How grateful we should be that we 
did not continue to hide under that musty old 
brown cloak of St. Anthony's Falls, which Fa- 



56 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

ther Hennepin substituted for lovely "Kakabi- 
kah" - "Severed Rock," the name the Chippewas 
had given them. 

The new town is growing now, and every 
boat brings many arrivals. The Bartons came, 
and tucked their house on the blufl side, buried 
among the trees, looking to our young eyes as 
picturesque and stately as a French chateau on 
wooded heights. The house still occupies its 
old site, but fronts now on Clifton Avenue, in- 
stead of, as formerly, on the lake. Florence 
Barton is now Mrs. C. M. Loring, and their 
lovely home is near the old house. It seems so 
right and fitting that our beloved "Father of 
Minneapolis Parks," whose broad vision and love 
of nature gave us Loring Park, as he listens for 
"the summoning bells of twilight time," should 
spend these last calm days on the ground made 
so beautiful by his labors of love. 

The stream of laughing boys and girls that 
troop in and out of the Shelter House by the 
great swing, Mr. Loring's beautiful gift, little 
reck of those pioneer children who played be- 
neath those same oak trees sixty-odd years ago. 
But to us, the echo of their gay young voices 
rings clear, and before us opens a landscape far 
different, wild, untamed, but full of infinitely 
endearing charm. With eyes, "like dry, brown 
flower pods still gripped by the memory of lost 
petals," we see again the scrubby oaks, the thistles 
in the fence corners, the fringing willows, the 
marsh, the slender path that "strung field to wood 
and wood to field." 



LP RING PARK ASPECTS 57 

Did the children who played under those oak 
trees, who drank tea from their acorn cups and 
gazed wide-eyed at the queer little Indian pa- 
pooses, did they ever faintly dream of the state- 
ly park, of the white walks, and of the throngs 
that would pass and re-pass on those walks to- 
day? Did they see the trim turf and the proud 
and haughty flowers that neither know nor care 
of bygone cowslips and violets but can never out- 
beauty them in our hearts? Did their elders 
dream of the steep bluff cut down and graded 
into streets lined with costly homes? Of the 
reflections of the Pro-cathedral, and the lovely 
tower of St. Marks, mirrored in the reedy lake, 
shining and shimmering like fairy towers? Of 
the stately Plaza and Armory looking down, 
where they hoed corn and raked the meadow 
hay ? Could their wildest fancies picture Loring 
Park at night, a fairy land of magical beauty 
with its gleaming lamps, the myriad lights of 
the city around it, the great buildings rising like 
white castles of mystery over the hilltops ? Such 
things were to be. Such things were to come 
to pass in the lifetime of the children who played 
under those trees and in those hazel brush 
thickets. 

But ah, in all the busy rush and whirl of life 
to-day, with all its wonder of achievement, to us 
older dreamers there are dreams that are not of 
the future but of the past. 

What laughter was it that I heard? 
What stir of footsteps entered in? 



58 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

What was the murmur, what the word, 

That made my heart a swirling din, 
That made me lean to other eyes 
And made the sudden tears arise? 

Mr. C. M. Loring, for whose efforts 
for the park system of this city we can 
never be thankful enough, adds in a 
private letter these early remembrances 
of the park that has been named for 
him: 

When I first saw Johnson's Lake, there was 
a very large spring of water called the Big 
Spring on the south side of it, a spring that kept 
the water so high that a large stream flowed from 
the lake and discharged into Bassett's Creek. 
When the sewer was built on Fifteenth Street, 
it cut off the spring much to our regret. For 
several years after the park was acquired, the 
spring kept as much as an acre of water from 
freezing so that it had to be fenced off to prevent 
the skaters from getting too near the thin ice. 
After the spring was cut, the lake froze entirely 
over and all the fish died so that tons of them 
had to be hauled away in the spring. 

The only trees now living in the park that 
were on the land when it was purchased are the 
tamaracks, the great willows, and the grand old 
oaks. When Fifteenth Street was graded, many 
fine trees were destroyed. 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 59 

A marsh occupied the spot now covered by 
the smaller lake. Through this marsh the stream 
ran. The marsh was taken out and the material 
spread over the high land as it was very rich in 
lime. Just under the turf the marl was almost 
pure lime. I had it analyzed and it was ninety- 
five per cent pure. It was as white as snow. 

What a wonderfully beautiful quarter section 
of land that was ! Many times I wandered over 
it when I first came to Minneapolis, and I came 
very near purchasing the lot Mr. Wells bought, 
but my wife and I decided that it was too far out 
in the country. 

Joseph S. Johnson was born at Farm- 
ington, Maine, June 15, 181 1, the son 
of Joseph Johnson, a merchant. He 
obtained his education in the public 
schools there. After a few years in 
California following the year 1849, he 
returned to Farmington. But the lure 
of the Great West was on him and he 
could not resist the call. Samuel A. 
Jewett was then living in St. Anthony. 
He owned a large tract of land on 
Western Avenue along what was later 
known as Bassett's Creek. Mr. John- 
son joined him here and took up the 
land of the park which Mr. Jewett had 



60 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

selected for him against his arrival. 
He at once began building the little 
white cottage. 

While at work on it, he gave the 
name of "Jewett Lake" to the little 
sheet of water afterwards known as 
Johnson's Lake. This was in honor of 
his wife, Ann Wilder Jewett, a daugh- 
ter of Samuel and Sarah (Kimball) 
Jewett, natives of Massachusetts. 

Mr. and Mrs. Johnson had three 
daughters. One was Mrs. Anna K. 
West, recently deceased; the second is 
Mrs. E. P. Wells of Groveland Ave- 
nue; the third, who was born in the 
Park (Sara Johnson), is Mrs. Paul A. 
Pierce of New York. 

Mr. Johnson died in 1891 at the aee 
of eighty. His wife lived until 1898. 
They were among the first members 
of the First Baptist Church. 

T. K. Gray was born of Scotch an- 
cestry at Jefferson, Maine, on June 17, 
1833, was educated at Wescosset Acad- 
emy at Waldoboro, Maine, and ac- 
quired a general knowledge of drugs 
from reading medical books. He was 




Oliver C. Gray 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 63 

in Toledo, Ohio, until 1855, when, with 
his brother, Oliver C. Gray, he came 
to St. Anthony's Falls. Early in 1857 
he bought the interest of Dr. Greeley 
in a West Side drug store and with 
another brother, John Gray, formed a 
new partnership under the name of 
Gray Brothers. John Gray retired in 
1874. In 1865, T. K. Gray married 
Miss Julia Allen, daughter of the Rev. 
Lorenzo B. Allen. Six children were 
born in the house at the corner of 
Spruce Place and Oak Grove Street. 
Mr. Gray died on December 24, 1909, 
the oldest retail merchant in Minne- 
apolis. 

A. B. Barton, another of the early 
"neighbors," was born in Portland, 
Maine, was for a time in business in 
Boston, but came to St. Anthony's Falls 
in 1859. 

Olive Francis Barton, his wife, was 
born in Livermore, Maine. 

The Bartons bought nine acres of the 
old Johnson farm and built the house, 
now greatly changed, that stands at 202 
Clifton Avenue. At the time it was 



64 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

built, it faced Oak Grove Street and a 
lane led up the hill to it. Clifton Av- 
enue, when cut through, was to have 
been named for Mr. Barton, but with 
his customary modesty he declined the 
honor. He was in the retail dry goods 
business on his arrival, was an early 
secretary of the Board of Trade, first 
superintendent of Lakewood Cemetery, 
and one of the organizers of the Gen- 
eral Electric. He died in 1904 and his 
wife in 1905. One daughter, Florence 
Barton, Mrs. Charles M. Loring, sur- 
vives. 

Thus we behold the pictures of the 
Johnson family, the first white settlers 
in Loring Park, get brief glimpses of 
the daily life of the old farm-house in 
the park, and obtain some slight in- 
formation about "the neighbors" in 
"the fifties." 

The rest is silence and forest and 
field, quiet country, and old immemo- 
rial woods and hills. But a great and a 
restless population is pushing rapidly 
westward, swarming over the fertile 
prairies and crossing the great rivers 




Olive Francis Barton (Mrs. A. B. Barton) 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 67 

and mountain ranges on its way to the 
Pacific. And it will soon overrun 
these old fields and woods and hills and 
build over the surfaces of these quiet 
farms a great and a still growing city. 



Ill 

WASTE PAPER BASKET OF MEMORIES 

THE Park Idea is Born-O there 
were cakes and ale in St. Anthony 
and in the town that was to be Minne- 
apolis in the days when Bridge Square 
was in its glory! Pioneers who are 
now well up on the beach, thrown like 
battered old conches high and dry- not 
always so dry -by the receding tide, 
smile, nay, chuckle when "Jimmie 
Cyphers" is mentioned. Jimmie ran 
the only restaurant in town in the early 
sixties, in a small room ten by twenty 
feet in happy adjacency to the law of- 
fice of McNair & Wilson. 

McNair & Wilson's office was a good 
deal like "the Club." On gay Satur- 
day evenings prominent business men, 
when their wives were out of town, and 
too often when they were not, met at 
"Mac's" (William Woodbridge Mc- 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 69 

Nair) and at 'Gene's (the Hon. Eu- 
gene M. Wilson) place to play "Old 
Sledge" and, incidentally, to talk over 
village affairs. It was the first Civic 
and Commerce Association. "Among 
those present" were David Redfield, J. 
K. Sidle, Richard Martin, George Kin- 
nan, Major Emmet, and C. M. Loring, 
who alone of all these remains with us 
today. 

One evening famous in history, 
though the members of the Club knew 
it not, "Mac" remarked that the town 
was growing and cited the names of 
several men who had recently come to 
the Falls with money to invest. Every- 
body was interested then. Talk be- 
came general. Jimmie Cyphers cir- 
culated "the spread." I assume that 
some of it was in liquid form. "Mac" 
recurred to his theme and stated that 
he believed that "this town was some 
day going to have fifty thousand peo- 
ple!" Everybody paused to consider 
the glory of the prospect. It would be 
a city! 

Then up spake "C. M." (Charles 



70 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

M. Loring, general merchandising, of 
the firm of L. Fletcher & Co.) and said 
that if such were to be the case, then it 
was time "that we were looking out for 
ground for a park." 

So Loring Park and the others were 
born. For this was the germ of the 
whole park idea in Minneapolis, and 
the first time that parks were mention- 
ed. Mr. Loring, "the Father of the 
Minneapolis Park System," never lost 
the inspiration and has ever since con- 
sistently "followed the gleam." 

For these and other reasons we have 
the Loring Park of today. Something 
it yet needs to make it for us all that it 
should be and will be. We must give 
it the flavors. 

A Background is Needed- "Shall 
we take the Long Path?" asked the gen- 
tle Autocrat of the Breakfast Table of 
the school mistress at the close of an 
autocracy of which none complain. 
And then he asked her to be quite sure 
of her answer, for if she decided to take 
the Long Path with him, it would be 
for life. 




C. M. LORING IN 1864 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 73 

They were on Boston Common to- 
gether and the Long Path is a well 
known feature of the Common. And 
so it got itself into literature and hun- 
dreds of persons go there and take the 
Long Path for Oliver Wendell Holmes' 
sake. 

And at midnight on January r, 1900, 
on the opening of the new century, Ed- 
ward Everett Hale stood at the head of 
the Common and read to a great mul- 
titude the Psalm beginning, "Lord, 
thou hast been our dwelling place in 
all generations." This Psalm was read 
from the same place at the opening of 
the century before. It will be read 
again in the same place on January 1, 
2000. 

Something of such a background as 
this Loring Park needs. 

The Light of Other Days -Yet 
who shall say that the park has not al- 
ready something of this atmosphere? 
While this book was underway, I 
clipped from the columns of the Min- 
neapolis Journal the following poem 



74 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

with the caption line "Loring Park in 
the '6o's" signed by the initials H.P.K. : 

I dream beneath the willows gray; the years 
Roll back, the sedgy pond appears, 
Again I see the waving meadow grass, 
Again the flying feet that swiftly pass 
Along the meadow path, when in our play 
We ran that way. 

I see the young, green willows, straight and slim 
Make leafy lairs, with shadows cool and dim, 
The "sallies" where we played at hide and seek 
And wandered in our little bare white feet. 
Willows with trunks now old and gnarled and 
gray 

Like me today. 

I see the meadow grasses, deep and free, 
Rolling in wind swept waves like a green sea; 
The warm and scented path, the droning bees. 
The butterflies, the clover to our knees; 
I see the cowslips' yellow glory rim 
The lake's low brim. 

Again I pluck the flag root and the fern, 
Again I see the Indian paint brush burn 
Its crimson torches on the sidling hill, 
And the wild columbine its honey spill 
And nod its red and yellow tassels still. 

I see the tiger lilies on the slope 

Swaying on slender stalks; the wild gentian ope 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 75 

Blue eyes from under fringing lids. I see 
The red bird flash, a flame from tree to tree, 
And you-dart like the bird from flower to flower 
So gay the hour. 

Oh , dear and far off days, kept in my heart 
With you, my playmate sweet, long years apart! 
Oh but to sing the songs of childhood sweet, 
To tread the meadow path with flying feet! 
I dream beneath the willows old and gray. 
Like me today. 

Gold Hunters Camp Here -I was 
told by a man who was almost born on 
the fringes of Loring Park that "in the 
seventies" one of his boyhood joys was 
to chum with the gold hunters who were 
camping beside the brook that flowed 
out of Johnson's Lake and crossed Hen- 
nepin Avenue under the bridge about 
one hundred feet south of Superior 
Avenue. On the other side of Henne- 
pin, across from the present Pro-cathe- 
dral site, was a fine camping spot cov- 
ered with splendid trees and bordering 
on the brook that flowed under the 
present site of the stone and tile auto- 
mobile buildings now on the corner of 
Harmon Place and Hennepin. 



76 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

These gold hunters were on their 
way to the Black Hills. The smoke of 
their camp-fires filled this little hollow 
of the hills. 

A year or so later, they came back 
there and camped. Their outfits were 
pretty well shot to pieces and they had 
not gathered up the gold by the barrow 
load as they shovel out the iron on the 
range. This Black Hills gold was 
down deep and stuck fast in the rocks 
and it required about a million dollars 
of capital to "make a mine." But 
think of the glorious adventure these 
Loring Park campers had in finding 
out these now patent facts. 

Hutching Hill-W. H. Grim- 
shaw relates the incident of seeing a 
crowd of men and boys come scurry- 
ing down Hutchins' Hill on their way 
to Lake Calhoun to rescue Eliza Win- 
ston, a slave girl, held there by a South- 
ern gentleman who had come North 
for the summer. The Eliza Winston 
incident is well known in the early his- 
tory of the town and I need not go into 
it here, but why Hutchins' Hill? It 




Mrs. C. H. Wiltberger 
Who lived on the site of the Cathedral 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 79 

took some research, but it was finally 
discovered. It was the hill that ran 
down and out Hennepin Avenue from 
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets to the 
Loring Park brook. Chandler Hutch- 
ins built the house that stood on the 
site of the present Catholic Pro-cathe- 
dral. Silas Hutchins, his father, lived 
near-by. Hence Hutchins' Hill. A 
daughter of Silas Hutchins married 
John Green who took up the quarter 
section that is now Green's Addition on 
the top of Lowry Hill. A grand- 
daughter of Silas Hutchins, Mrs. L. 
E. Carpenter, still resides on Douglas 
Avenue on the land of the old Green 
farm. 

The Chandler Hutchins house, par- 
tially built over, was later occupied by 
the C. H. Wiltberger family and still 
later by the well known R. F. Jones as 
a zoological farm. The house re- 
mained until the Pro-cathedral re- 
placed it. 

The Indian Trail -The Indian 
Trail through this valley ran from the 
Calhoun village of the Dakotas to the 



8o LORING PARK ASPECTS 

Falls of St. Anthony, along the eastern 
sides of Calhoun and Lake of the Isles, 
across Green's Addition, down Waver- 
ly Place, west of Spring Lake, to Bas- 
sett's Creek and so, following the creek 
to the river. 

The Military Road -This govern- 
ment road ran through the Loring 
Park Valley to Fort Ridgely and be- 
yond. The Snelling Branch and the 
Falls Branch joined in the valley of the 
Minnesota. It followed, generally, the 
present course of Hennepin Avenue to 
the Cemetery and so on to the "Red 
Mill" at Edina. 

Mount PiSGAH-The high ridge, 
now cut down, formerly along the site 
of the present Ridgewood Avenue and 
Clifton Avenue extending from near 
Vine Place nearly to Lyndale Avenue, 
was called Mount Pisgah from a pop- 
ular hymn of that day, two lines of 
which ran: 

As from Mount Pisgah's lofty height 
I view my home and take my flight. 




The Simple Elegance of the Fifties 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 83 

KAKABIKAH-The translation of this 
word is "Severed Rock." It was the 
Chippewa name for the Falls of St. 
Anthony. 

Gray's Lake -This was the present 
Spring Lake beyond the Parade. It 
was at one time also called Huron 
Lake, but the name did not stick. It 
was named for T. K. Gray. A stream 
ran from it and joined Lost Brook on 
its way to Bassett's Creek. 

Old STEEPY-The bluff in front and 
south of the Thomas Lowry house, 
later cut away to let Hennepin Avenue 
over the hill, was called Old Steepy. 
This bluff was "as steep as the roof of 
a house" and was most difficult to 
climb. The whole top of this hill has 
been cut away and the earth thrown in- 
to the Parade swamp. 

Dennis Peters "took up" this won- 
derful quarter section of land on the 
sides and top of Old Steepy. It was 
afterwards sold to Dr. C. G. Goodrich 
whose daughter was the wife of Thom- 
as Lowry. Hence Mr. Lowry's fine 
house, built in 1874 and now the prop- 



84 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

erty of T. B. Walker. A portion of 
this Lowry homestead block has been 
given to the city by Mr. Walker for a 
public library and art gallery. Dennis 
Peters' house was about on the site of 
the Lowry residence and his sheds and 
barns in a ravine to the south, about 
Groveland Avenue. This ravine ran 
fifty feet under the present surface 
where the Lowry statue stands. It was 
filled in for the Government road and 
the whole cut down later. 

The Washington Yale Woods - 
This was the forest that orginally cov- 
ered the north section of Loring Park 
and the adjacent property. Many of 
the old trees remain. The "Picnic 
Ground" of those days was near the 
corner of Spruce Place and Fourteenth 
Street. 

The Old Chief's Grave -This 
grave I am unable to locate exactly. It 
was on the top of the bluff about where 
Logan or Morgan Avenues cut Mount 
Curve Avenue. It is thought that the 
grade has been cut down and the old 
site lost. For many years after John 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 85 

Green took up his quarter section, the 
Indians were accustomed to make sum- 
mer pilgrimages to this grave and re- 
main there for a day or two at a time. 
The four great bowlders that marked 
it, they would every year paint over 
red again. Finally, when the white 
people became too numerous, the In- 
dians returned for the last time, opened 
the grave and removed the bones to 
some more secure location. Who this 
Great Chief or Medicine Man was, I 
have not been able to discover. 

The Haunted House- All the pio- 
neers of the Loring Park section tell of 
"the haunted house." Two small 
houses occupied lots between the Plaza 
Hotel and the Brook. The house near- 
est the Plaza block was occupied by a 
man named John Holmes, and in this 
house, because of despondency, he 
killed himself. The house was known 
to be haunted after that time, but I 
have been unable to discover any living 
person who saw or heard the ghost. 

The Beede House- Built and occu- 
pied by William Beede this house was 



86 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

next in line north of the haunted house. 
No pictures of these houses survive. 

Barber's Pasture -This was west of 
Lyndale Avenue in the valley between 
the bluff and the hill back of the Dun- 
woody Institute. Here the cows of the 
town were driven to pasture by the 
boys. It was owned by D. R. Barber. 

Powderhorn Lake -This lake was 
in the vicinity of Lyndale Avenue and 
Franklin. The present Powderhorn 
Lake was then called Casey's Lake. 

The Bridge over the Ravine -The 
bridge picture with this section gives a 
view of the ridge that few living Min- 
neapolitans have seen. This bridge 
started on or near the present Clifton 
Avenue, a little east of the Barton res- 
idence, and ran over a deep ravine to a 
second and much more mountainous 
ridge somewhere near the present 
Groveland and Ridgewood Avenues. 
The exact location is lost, for when this 
section was "improved," the tops of the 
two ridges were cut away and thrown 
into the ravine. Old residents mourn 
that the landscape artist of later days 




The Bridge over the Ravine 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 89 

was not then born to treat properly in 
the matter of streets and sites this in- 
comparable residence section. 

The house faintly indicated in the 
picture at the top of the bluff was the 
residence of William W. King, who 
built it in i860 or 1861, with a long car- 
riage road down to Nicollet Avenue. 
Vine Place did not then exist. Mrs. 
King was Julia Lovejoy, daughter of 
James A. Lovejoy. The youngest son 
of this family now resides at 1716 Col- 
fax Avenue south, and a daughter, Mrs. 
Charles S. Hardy, at 68 South Elev- 
enth Street. 

James Couchman purchased the 
King house in 1864 and lived there for 
many years. His daughter still lives at 
Lake Minnetonka. A niece, Mrs. 
W. G. Hollis, resides at 3035 Irving 
Avenue south. 

The Rev. James H. Tuttle, so well 
known here, occupied the King house 
later in its career, until it was taken 
down and its stately site reduced. 

The Finest View in the Valley - 
Emerson in his "Divinity School Ad- 



9 o LORING PARK ASPECTS 

dress" speaks of the unique impression 
of Jesus upon mankind, "whose name is 
not so much written as plowed into the 
history of this world." 

Standing at the southeastern corner 
(the inside corner) of the Hennepin 
Avenue Methodist Church, it is pos- 
sible to obtain a view across this valley 
that few persons have seen. The eye 
glances along the eastern sides of the 
Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church 
and of St. Mark's Pro-cathedral, across 
the valley to the front of the Pro-cathe- 
dral of St. Mary, giving a wonderful 
illustration of the influence of Jesus 
upon this valley in the short time that 
it has been occupied. This is the finest 
view, architecturally speaking, to be 
found in Minneapolis. 



IV 

THE INDIANS 

PUBLIC opinion and the prevalent 
sense of humor do not permit the 
emotional American to express himself 
with any degree of freedom. I know 
of one person who, for these reasons, 
looked carefully around to see that the 
action was not observed by his fellow 
countrymen before he placed his arms 
as far as they would go around the 
great oak tree at the Grant Street en- 
trance to Loring Park and pressed a 
kiss of real affection and understanding 
against its rough back -much as one 
roaming in the park of a sunny after- 
noon might greet his long gone great- 
great-great-grandmother should he 
meet her unexpectedly, still vigorous 
and flourishing, despite a passage of 
time in which decades and centuries 
had fallen "like grains of sand." 



92 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

This enormous vegetable -reference 
is made to the oak tree and not to the 
aged female relation -was undoubtedly 
growing where it now stands, a sturdy- 
young forest tree, when Fort Snelling, 
for many years thereafter the extreme 
outpost of frontier civilization, was 
erected in 1819. No white man had 
laid hand or ax to it, for it was many 
years after this time before there was a 
white settlement north of Prairie du 
Chien. It was the policy of the Gov- 
ernment of the United States to allow 
no white men except the employes of 
the fur companies in Loring Park or on 
any of the other Indian lands, and this 
tree, as long as the Indians maintained 
their opposition to hard manual labor 
such as lumbering entails, was as safe 
as any tree on this continent could well 
be. For why should any sensible per- 
son engaged in the pursuit of happiness 
cut down trees while there was plenty 
and to spare of dead and down timber 
that would serve as firewood? The 
Indian was not so great a fool. He 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 93 

spent his time, and there seemed to him 
to be plenty of it, in living. It is an 
art that many of his successors on this 
spot have lost if they ever had it. They 
merely work in the office, or elsewhere, 
pending the time when they will be 
able to escape and live. This expected 
happy time is like tomorrow. It fails 
to keep its appointments. 

The Indians had for thousands of 
years been occupied in perfecting their 
art of living. I have consulted numer- 
ous authorities in an attempt to discov- 
er where these Indians originally came 
from and how long they have been here, 
but I find that even the wisest among 
the writers of books about them are 
rather non-committal. Perhaps the 
best ethnological bet is that the red men 
were originally Mongolian Tartars 
who, in some unknown way, possibly 
by means of boats or of ice floes follow- 
ing the breakup of the glacial period, 
found themselves "across" and worked 
their way down the coast, gradually 
spreading over the whole of North 



94 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

America. These last six or seven 
thousand years would give them all the 
time needed for this program. 

We do know, however, that our 
Sioux were once "Easterners" who, 
centuries ago, adopted some dusky 
Horace Greeley's advice to "Go West 
and grow up with the country." Eth- 
nologists have shown that the tribes of 
the Sioux linguistic stock, a stock to 
which those found in the vicinity of 
Loring Park belonged, at one time oc- 
cupied the Piedmont and Atlantic 
Coast areas between the Appalachian 
range and the Atlantic Ocean in the 
present states of Virginia, North Caro- 
lina, and South Carolina. The bison 
had crossed the Appalachians, proba- 
bly by the Cumberland Gap, and were 
once in the Piedmont area. It is 
thought that the retirement of the bison 
from that section, or their growing 
scarcity there, drew the ancestors of 
our Dakotas westward. Prior to 1800 
the bison were found in the western 
portion of Wisconsin and over nearly 
all the State of Minnesota. But on the 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 95 

whole it is just as likely that it was the 
wild rice that held the early Sioux in 
the Mississippi and Minnesota valleys. 
This wild rice was God's free offering 
to the aborigine and he accepted it 
gratefully and thought no more about 
it. 

Schoolcraft states that in the first 
part of the nineteenth century the Da- 
kotas were in three principal villages. 
"The first of these was east of the Mis- 
sissippi and about four miles from the 
Minnesota river. The second was on 
the Mississippi river. The third was 
on both sides of the Minnesota river 
about six miles from its mouth." 

La Harpe mentions nine Dakota vil- 
lages west and seven east of the Mis- 
sissippi. In these he figures about two 
thousand inhabitants, an estimate that 
other authorities consider far too small. 
Seven or eight thousand is a much more 
reasonable supposition. The Calhoun 
village on the site of the city of Minne- 
apolis was made up of these Indians. 
How long they had been in and out of 
Loring Park it is idle to conjecture, 



96 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

but we find them strongly in evidence 
in the vicinity when Father Hennepin 
reached the Falls in 1680. 

When Fort Snelling was erected in 
1 8 19, the Dakota village at Lake Cal- 
houn, which the Indians called "the 
Inland Lake," had a population of five 
hundred to seven hundred persons -to 
say nothing of the dogs. These In- 
dians were familiar with Loring Park, 
Spring Lake, and the glens and heights 
of the Lowry Hill Range, but they had 
done nothing to improve them. As a 
matter of fact they needed no improve- 
ment, for they furnished famous hunt- 
ing grounds as they were. There were 
otters in Bassett's Creek where it 
crossed Fourth Street long after Col- 
onel Stevens had built his house above 
the Falls and what Lost Brook may 
have contained in the way of otter, 
beaver, and other wild life, we can now 
only conjecture. 

Thanks to the Brothers Pond, Sam- 
uel W. and Gideon H., who came to 
the Calhoun village as missionaries in 
1 834, we know much about the outskirts 



dPTorth 

\ 







f# I: 



\ 




Indian Trails in Minneapolis 

Mr. Pond's Map, taken from the book, Two Volunteer 
Missionaries Among the Dakotas, by S. W. Pond, Jr. 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 99 

of Loring Park. In a letter one of the 
brothers has left this description of the 
Indian town: 

The village which stands on the southeast side 
of the lake (Calhoun) consists of fourteen dwell- 
ing houses, besides other small ones. The houses 
are large and two or three families live in some 
of them. You would not see our house from the 
village but turning to the right along the east 
bank of the lake, and ascending a hill, after 
walking about a quarter of a mile, you would 
find our house on the high ground I mentioned 
before as being covered with timber, between 
the woods and the lake. 

Mr. Pond's letter was accompanied 
by a rude map of the present site of 
Minneapolis, giving the location at 
Lake Calhoun of the Indian village 
which occupied^ apparently, the site 
upon which the Misses Elsa, Brenda, 
and Anne Ueland spent their child- 
hood. Mr. Pond also indicated on his 
map the two well trodden Indian 
trails or paths from the village to the 
Falls. One of these passed through 
our own Hollow of the Hills. So we 
have the first thoroughfare through the 
valley all laid out for us to study and 



ioo LORING PARK ASPECTS 

retrace. The other trail bent away 
from the lake and, avoiding the rough- 
er ground of the Lowry Hill section, 
bore away for the Falls across the prai- 
rie over towards Nicollet Avenue, 
striking the river somewhere from 
Fourth to Eighth Avenues south. 

But the first trail, and this is our 
peculiar property for it runs through 
our valley, made its way along the 
eastern shore of Lake Calhoun, skirted 
the eastern shore of Lake of the Isles, 
thence struck a little east of north, cut- 
ting the Lowry Hill bluff at Waverly 
Place. The trail then connected with 
Bassett's Creek by running west of 
Spring Lake and across Bryn Mawr, 
and followed the valley of this beauti- 
ful stream to the river. Near where 
Waverly Place cuts the Lowry Hill 
bluff, a glen or depression ran down 
through the hill. Even to modern 
times traces of the old glen were to be 
found extending back from the bluff 
across Humbolt Avenue and the lots 
now occupied by Ezra Farnsworth, C. 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 101 

W. Somerby, G. Fred Smith, Frank 
Reed, and the eastern portion of the 
large lot on the Mount Curve frontage 
of the same block. When the Pond 
map is imposed on the present map of 
the city, the old trail appears to find its 
way over the brow of the hill near the 
former Waverly Place glen. 

Mahpiya Wicasta, whose name is 
translated Cloud-Man or Man-of-the- 
Sky, was chief of this Calhoun band of 
Sioux. He is described, in 1834, as a 
man of about forty years of age, re- 
spected and loved by his people and as 
well obeyed as Indian chiefs usually 
were. He was an intelligent man of a 
good disposition and showed no hos- 
tility to the approach of white civiliza- 
tion. Some of his band -and these are 
the names of Indians who formerly 
roamed the Loring Park district and 
trapped game there- were Eagle-Head, 
Whistling-Wind, Spirit- Walker, Iron- 
Lightning, Thunder-Face, Zitkadan- 
Duta (Red Bird), Rapacoca-Maza, 
Owanca-Duta, two brothers named 



102 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

Hepi and Catan, Wamdiokie, Seca- 
Duta, Minnie-apa-win and To-te-duta- 
win. 

While the translations of some of 
these names are, perhaps, better than 
others of which we read, it must be con- 
fessed that the pioneer as a rule, in his 
translations into English of Indian 
names, was not happy. Take the ra- 
ther humorous Indian name of Rain-in- 
the-Face and give it its proper quality 
by a correct translation of the thought, 
and we have the noble appellation 
of Man-Who-Turns-His-Face-to-the- 
Storm or perhaps better still, He-Who- 
Faces-the-Storm. Perhaps the Indian 
of the Calhoun band who was called 
by the white men Whistling-Wind finds 
a better and more correct place in 
history as The-Strength-of-the-Storm. 
Iron-Lightning, too, may weigh heav- 
ier in the estimation of posterity as 
Heaven's-Hard-Stroke. Even Spirit- 
Walker loses some slight humorous 
connotation with our own Weary Walk- 
er by a translation that better indicates 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 103 

his peculiar gift, One-Who-Slips- 
through-the-Forest-Like-a-Shadow. 

These dignified and photographic 
names have something of the native 
dignity of their original Indian posses- 
sors. 

Beyond the shadow of a doubt, these 
very Indians roamed this very hollow, 
knew its circling hills as we know them, 
dreamed their dreams, sang their songs, 
lived out their days, and knew the joys 
of life and the fear of death here, as 
we know them today. I picture the 
solitary Indian wending his way down 
the Lowry Hill bluff and singing to 
himself his tribe's "Song of the New 
Spirit on Arriving in the Spirit 
World": 

Ate he u-we, ate he u-we 
Ate eyaya he u-we lo, 
Ate eyaya he u-we lo, 
Yanipe-kta eya u-we lo, 
Yanipe-kta eya u-we lo, 

There is the father coming. 
There is the father coming, 
The father says this as he comes, 
The father says this as he comes, 



io 4 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

"You shall live/' he says as he comes, 
"You shall live!' he says as he comes. 

Or perhaps, while sitting by the side 
of Lost Brook, he hummed to himself 
the old Sioux hymn that claimed this 
beloved bit of the earth as the work of 
Wakantanka, the Great Spirit or Fa- 
ther. This song was called "Lechel 
Miyoqan-kte" : 

Lechel miyoqan-kte lo — yoyoyol 

Lechel miyoqan-kte lo — yoyoyol 

Taku maka-ichagha hena mitawa-ye lo — yoyoyo! 

Taku maka-ichagha hena mitawa-ye lo — yoyoyo! 

Ate heye lo — yoyoyo! 

Ate heye lo — yoyoyo! 

Eya yoyoyo! 

Eya yoyoyo! 

This is to be my work — yoyoyo! 
This is to be my work — yoyoyo! 
All that grows upon the earth is mine — yoyoyo! 
All that grows upon the earth is mine — yoyoyo! 
Says the father — yoyoyo! 
Says the father — yoyoyo! 
Eya yoyoyo! 
Eya yoyoyo! 

The Indians were not altogether 
hunters and poets. Some of them al- 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 105 

lowed and encouraged their squaws to 
cultivate on the fertile prairie east of 
Calhoun considerable fields of quickly 
maturing corn. In the year 1839 Can- 
puha raised 100 bushels; Xarirota, 50 
bushels; Hoxidan-Sapa 50 bushels; 
Karboka, 240 bushels, and Ohin-Pa- 
Duta, 440 bushels. While the squaws 
did the work, the men more nobly spent 
their time hunting and ranging the 
woods. Frequently they listened in 
awe to the thunder of the Falls or wan- 
dered idly in Loring Park. 

Their attire, before the costumes of 
the white men contributed to it, was 
picturesque and nobly beautiful. It 
was made up of leather hunting shirt, 
leggings reaching to the thigh, large 
blanket, and moccasins. The leggings 
and ornamentation were of striking col- 
or, some black, others blue, red, or yel- 
low. Sometimes one legging was black 
and the other blue or red, thus adding 
an agreeable variety in legs to the beau- 
ties of the primitive landscape. The 
men wore breech-cloths, which formed 



106 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

the only difference in the dress of the 
sexes. 

With them roamed their faithful 
dogs, friendly but suspicious. Mr. 
Pond estimated that in the Calhoun 
village there were about six hundred 
dogs, all of them ambitious to announce 
anything from the appearance of the 
new moon to the arrival of a hostile 
Ojibway "and as soon as the first bark 
has cleft the stillness, a discordant 
chorus resounds to the remotest border 
of the camp." 

But one hot day in July of 1839, they 
found something to announce that 
stirred this entire region to its depths. 
Men, women, and children of the vil- 
lage were happily engaged in swim- 
ming, fishing, chopping wood, singing, 
yelling, playing, and wailing, when 
suddenly, "like a peal of thunder when 
no cloud is visible," writes Mr. Pond, 
"here, there, everywhere, awoke the 
startling war-whoop. Hoo, hoo, hoo! 
Blankets were thrown into the air; men, 
women, and children ran -they ran for 
life., Terror sat on every face -mo- 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 107 

thers grasped their little ones. All 
around was crying, wailing, shrieking, 
storming, and scolding. Men vowed 
vengeance, whooped defiance, and 
dropped bullets into their gun barrels. 
The excitement was intense and univer- 
sal! The Chippewas! The Chippe- 
was have surrounded us -we shall all 
be butchered! Rapacoca-Maza is 
killed!" 

On the southeastern shore of Lake 
Harriet the son-in-law of the chief lay 
dead, a bullet hole through his body 
and his scalp torn from his head. The 
summoning runners were soon scudding 
in all directions bringing up additions 
to the forces of vengeance. 

And this is what the Loring Park 
trail now sees late on the hot afternoon 
of that July day. The avengers of 
blood from as far away as Shakopee's 
band, to the number of about four hun- 
dred, in full war-paint, with Red Bird 
at their head, come trailing down over 
Lowry Hill, across Bryn Mawr and 
along the valley of Bassett's Creek to 
the Falls. A long wail goes up from 



108 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

four hundred throats. Red Bird utters 
his imprecatory prayer to the gods and 
the spirits of the ancestors. The pipe 
of war goes down the ranks and Red 
Bird lays his hands on all heads bind- 
ing the warriors to strike valiantly for 
their gods and for their homes. 

The next evening the runners with 
news from the battle begin to trail their 
way back again through our Hollow 
of the Hills to the Calhoun village. 
Red Bird, his son, and a dozen others 
of the warriors are killed. But the Da- 
kotas have exacted a terrible penalty 
from their ancient enemies. The Chip- 
pewa band is nearly exterminated. 
Seventy scalps dangle from poles 
on Judge Ueland's lawn. The scalp 
dance lasts for a month. Mr. Pond 
bears this eloquent witness : 

"It seemed as if hell had emptied it- 
self here." 

But it was not all rejoicing and glory. 
The plaintive song and the bitter and 
long continued waitings of the bereaved 
mother and lonely wife resound in these 
woods and along these shores and hills, 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 109 

"one of the saddest sounds," writes Mr. 
Pond, "when heard in the silence of the 
forest, in the dusk of evening, which 
ever fell on human ear or issued from 
human lips. It was a wailing for the 
dead." 

Long before we came here, our Hol- 
low of the Hills, our hillsides and 
shores had their solitary weepers, those 
who wandered through Loring Park or 
sat upon the hills surrounding it, pon- 
dering the questions of the heart, the 
old problems of life and death and! 
grief and finding no answer. 

For the Indians were not at first in- 
clined to accept the statements and ex- 
planations of the missionaries. They 
considered themselves religious al- 
ready. The Rev. Gideon H. Pond 
makes this entry in his diary: 

This afternoon I had some conversation with 
Kayan Rotanka who is strongly of the opinion 
that their religion and that of the bible are the 
same, and that he has been a Christian twenty 
years. Deluded man ! Can these dry bones live ? 

Yes, these dry bones can live and they 
do live. Cloud-Man, chief of the Cal- 



no LORING PARK ASPECTS 

houn band, had two daughters and sev- 
eral sons. One of the daughters mar- 
ried, in the Indian form, an officer in 
the army at Snelling. She was, as Mr. 
Pond bears witness, "a fine intelligent 
child, one of the most prepossessing in 
appearance of her race, and as bright 
and intelligent as she was handsome." 
She picked up a great deal of instruc- 
tion at the mission. Her daughter, 
who was called "Nancy" by the white 
people, although her proper name was 
Great Spirit, had two sons, active, in- 
telligent, and influential men. Their 
names are well known in the North- 
west. One of them, the Rev. John 
Eastman, was pastor of a Presbyterian 
church at Flandreau in South Dakota, 
and the other, Dr. Charles Eastman, a 
graduate of Dartmouth and a man of 
superior attainments, both literary and 
medical, has as his wife the poetess, 
Elaine Goodale. 

The book from which I have quoted 
so freely, Two Volunteer Missionaries 
Among the Dakotas, a book that should 



LORING PARK ASPECTS in 

be on the shelves of every Minneapolis 
library, says of these men: 

These two young men have usually been spo- 
ken of as full Dakotas, but strictly speaking they 
are three-quarter bloods. They are the great- 
grandsons of Cloud-Man of Lake Calhoun, the 
patriotic elements of whose character they seem 
to have inherited in marked degree. Such men - 
thoughtful, progressive, practical - are an honor 
to any age and to any race. 

The Indians were certainly religious 
enough in their way and they had their 
prophets and seers too. The descend- 
ants of the Red Wing band of the Sioux 
have preserved the details of the 
following extraordinary premonition 
which was told to Dr. John D. Quack- 
enbos by one of the tribe. More than 
a century before Fulton launched the 
"Clermont," Tatankamani, an aged 
chief, predicted that a strange creature, 
with two black parallel horns emitting 
smoke, would come up the Mississippi 
River and enter Lake Pepin, defying 
the children of the forest in terrible 
war-whoops. Thus the seer described 
the advent of the steamboat which he 



ii2 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

interpreted as a bad omen for his race. 
He chanted his prophecy on an over- 
hanging bluff of the river so impress- 
ively and with such assurance of its 
fulfilment that it was never lost sight 
of by his people. And when the first 
steamboat ascended the Mississippi and 
entered the lake, the Indians gathered 
on the bluff and as they gazed in won- 
der they sang the prediction of their 
prophet in his own words. 

Yes, the little forest tree, now the 
great and venerable oak at the Grant 
Street entrance of Loring Park, has 
seen all this -and much more. In the 
old woods it was elbowing its compan- 
ions for its place in the sun long before 
modern civilization had set foot in this 
section of the country. It has seen the 
Indian disappear and Lost Brook wan- 
der away forever. It has seen the first 
white man appear, measuring and se- 
lecting the lands he was to cultivate. 
It has watched the city in all its power 
and glory grow up around it. It has 
seen the old farms give way to the great 
streets and avenues flung across the 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 113 

flanks of the hills, to splendid buildings 
and to broad, sweeping parks and play- 
grounds. 

Very taciturn and determined this 
great oak has stood there all these 
years, building over air, sunshine, mois- 
ture, and soil into good, solid oak wood 
and worried neither by Indians, lum- 
bermen, lovers, farmers, poets, nor 
Park Boards. If it could tell its story, 
we should know much more about Lor- 
ing Park Valley and the little hills that 
shut it in. 



THE LOST BROOK 

I HAVE always respected the engi- 
neering ability that turned the Chi- 
cago River around. Here was a mud- 
dy and befouled stream pouring its 
floods of defilement into the city's 
drinking water. It was impossible to 
purify it. The only thing left to do 
was to make it flow the other way, out 
of the lake instead of into it. It was 
an indignity that no other river has 
suffered. It took mind, money, and 
time, but these essentials were at hand 
and the astonished river soon found it- 
self going the other way. 

Tennyson adopted the brook as the 
symbol of the eternal flow. Men might 
come and men might go, but the brook, 
chattering on its way to join the brim- 
ming river, went on forever. But 
these smaller streams have been even 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 115 

more cavalierly treated by the hands 
and minds of men. They have been 
filled in and the water carried away in 
drains or left to find its lost way as best 
it might. 

It is doubtless a foolish wish and per- 
haps a dangerous one that the same en- 
gineering skill that has turned the Chi- 
cago River around and has filled in the 
valley of our own Loring Park brook, 
might be applied to the River of Time. 

But it is neither upon the banks of 
the Chicago River, nor upon the marge 
of Tennyson's brook, that we stand to- 
day, but upon the new surface of the 
earth that now overlies the Lost Brook 
that once flowed in the Loring Park 
district, a stream that the hand of man 
has wiped so utterly from the earth that 
it can no longer be located in Hudson's 
complete "Dictionary of Minneapolis" 
nor found upon any of the present maps 
of the city. Barely a trace of its for- 
mer course can be seen in its old valley. 
Yet by consulting the minds of the eld- 
ers we may find this stream still flow- 
ing and we may bring to the surface 



n6 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

once more that old fertile, flowery, 
bird-haunted valley. For in a few hu- 
man hearts this stream flows still, as 
blue as the skies that once smiled above 
it and as free and unfading. 

"Where is the stream?" he cried with tears. 
"Seest thou not the blue waves above us?" He 
looked up and lo! the blue stream was flowing 
gently over their heads. 

In the wild country back of the grow- 
ing town of Minneapolis, before the 
city had begun to be thought about, 
this Lost Brook was a conspicuous 
meadow stream. It drained Johnson's 
Lake, now the Loring Park Lake, and 
it also took care of the surplus waters 
of Spring Lake and of the spongy, 
swampy country between. It began 
its course from the lake and from the 
great springs that formerly burst from 
the ground just east of the bridge in 
Loring Park and on the south side of 
the larger lake. It flowed through a 
swamp, now the smaller Loring Park 
Lake, and ran thence directly north. 
It crossed the yet unmarked Harmon 
Place about one hundred feet from that 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 117 

thorofare's future point of junction 
with Hennepin Avenue, and ran 
through the lowlands now covered by 
the buildings on the corner. Here it 
broadened somewhat and lingered. 
Then it slipped away suddenly to the 
west across the old country road (Hen- 
nepin Avenue) which was rudely 
bridged at a later day to give it pas- 
sage. How many of those who now 
travel Hennepin Avenue in ever grow- 
ing numbers look down and see, twelve 
or fifteen feet under the present sur- 
face of the avenue, the blue waters of 
the Lost Brook that once ran there? 

Crossing the field west of Hennepin, 
on land now owned by the city, the 
stream twisted north again and ran 
along what is now Lyndale Avenue, 
then bent west on Superior Avenue, 
turning north again farther up the 
avenue to join the Bassett's Creek 
swamp beyond the car tracks and the 
Laurel Avenue bridge -and so on to 
the Mississippi River. 

Walking over the ground with one 
who had spent much of his childhood 



n8 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

upon its banks, I have carefully re- 
traced the old valley of the Lost Brook, 
and I have followed its windings until 
all trace of them is lost in the mazes of 
the railroads. It was not so small a 
stream as one might imagine. Portions 
of its course boasted two feet of water. 
The boys had their swimming holes in 
these places and two of the children 
(Frank Wiltberger and Louise Hig- 
gins) once launched a home-made ca- 
noe upon the brook where it deepened 
in the hollow north of Harmon Place, 
a spot that is now covered with the tile 
and stone structures of the automobile 
trade. 

I have seen the Loring Park brook 
only through other eyes or as I have 
reconstructed it for myself from the old 
maps and from the descriptions of those 
who played upon its banks. It is a 
brook of lost youth. It symbolizes this 
invisible Brook or River of Time, flow- 
ing so steadily, and bringing you "and 
all your folks" into Loring Park for 
an afternoon of rest and sunshine -and 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 119 

then flowing remorselessly over you in 
your turn, and so on forever. 

I have spent long years within or up- 
on the rim of the hills that surround 
this depression of the earth's surface 
in which the Lost Brook once flowed - 
this Hollow of the Hills made up of 
Loring Park, the Parade, and the Bryn 
Mawr country- and it has all become 
dear to me, although the books of the 
city and county show no more than fif- 
ty feet of the precious soil that I may 
legally call mine. Possession in this 
way, however, is cumbersome and un- 
necessary. Appreciation is possession, 
and in that way one may be heir to the 
whole domain, though the tax assessor 
know him not. 

The Lost Brook had been flowing so 
long that, at its death, it outdated the 
pyramids of Egypt. For our first def- 
inite knowledge we have of Loring 
Park takes us back about 7,803 years. 
This may be made clearer to the imag- 
ination if it is written 5,885 B.C. It 
may seem difficult at first thought to 



120 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

connect such ancient worthies as Adam, 
or Noah, or Abraham with Lowry 
Hill, but it is well within the possibil- 
ities of research. Long before Adam's 
day, if the figures on the sides of the 
columns of the King James version of 
the Bible may be trusted (though I am 
given to understand by scholars that 
they may not be) the Mississippi River 
was running through the Bassett's 
Creek valley, across the Bryn Mawr 
lowlands and through the present 
Lowry Hill range, then not there, and 
through Cedar, Lake of the Isles, Cal- 
houn, and Harriet lakes, to its junction 
with the Minnesota River above Fort 
Snelling. This left Loring Park in a 
delightful prairie valley sloping grace- 
fully down to the river west of it. It 
was the valley of the possible stream 
that flowed there before the Lost 
Brook, on whose banks we are dream- 
ing today, was born. For the Lost 
Brook followed the last Glacial Epoch. 
But no description of the Loring 
Park section previous to the year 5,885 
B.C. will be attempted here. You 






LORING PARK ASPECTS 121 

must see it for yourself and bring to 
the view whatever power of the scien- 
tific imagination you may happen to 
possess. All that we are sure of is that 
the Mississippi River was then flowing 
across North Minneapolis through the 
Bassett's Creek basin and the lakes, 
joining the other river somewhere be- 
tween Snelling and Shakopee. The 
great gorge it cut through the Trenton 
limestone is there today, filled with 
glacial debris, to give us this geological 
tip. 

But it was long before the year 5,885 
B.C. that the Preadamites who lived in 
the Loring Park section told one an- 
other as they went down to their work 
in the morning that the climate was 
changing. At that time at least, they 
were correct in their assumption. The 
great Ice Age was coming on. It is 
probable that the last Glacial Epoch 
took centuries to perfect its suit. It 
had all the geological time there was 
and it was not hurried in the least. If 
the occurrence of our winter in aphe- 
lion, caused by the- Precession of 



122 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

Equinoxes and the revolution of the 
Line of the Apsides, about 11,300 years 
ago, was the cause of the last Glacial 
Period, it follows that it took about 
3,500 years for the establishment and 
withdrawal of the ice margin at Loring 
Park. What are little things like cen- 
turies between geologists? 

We do know at any rate that some- 
where around these formidable dates 
an eternal winter like that of the in- 
terior of Northern Greenland set in 
over Loring Park and Lowry Hill and 
that the great ice fields came grinding 
remorselessly down over them from the 
north. One of these glacial streams 
went down the valley of Lake Michi- 
gan, another down the valley of Green 
Bay and its continuation to Madison, 
Wisconsin. Still others streamed from 
Keweenaw Point and Duluth into Cen- 
tral Minnesota and Wisconsin It was 
one of these latter ice streams that came 
grinding and crushing into Loring 
Park. It filled the entire gorge of the 
great river in the Bassett's Creek basin 
solid full of old clay, bowlders, gravel, 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 123 

glaciers, and icebergs larger than the 
First National and Security Bank. The 
puzzled and bedammed river, unable 
to force a way through, turned to the 
east and northeast and made various 
channels to the present Mississippi- 
Minnesota valley and so, finally, began 
the Falls of St. Anthony where the riv- 
er tipped over into the gorge some- 
where near the present site of Fort 
Snelling. 

Since that time we know what has 
happened to the Falls. They have been 
receding steadily, cutting into the lime- 
stone ledge, until they have arrived 
where they are at the present time. 
This has taken 7,803 years as Professor 
N. H. Winchell has figured it. From 
the study of old documents and pictures 
of the Falls, he found that the rate of 
recession from 1680, Father Henne- 
pin's time, to 1856, was from four to 
six feet per year. As the whole dis- 
tance the Falls have gone is eight 
miles, the time required for the cutting 
of the gorge was found to average out 
at about 7,803 years. 



i2 4 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

We may make fanciful guesses at the 
appearance of Loring Park in the cen- 
turies before the ice era, but there is no 
doubt of its exact status about 7,803 
years ago, after the glacial streams of 
ice and debris had passed across the 
country from the north. Anyone who 
thinks of this glacial time as "a cold 
snap" or as "a spell of weather" is not 
doing the climate of that time justice. 
Professor Alexander Winchell writes 
of it in words that show its catastrophic 
quality. 

The entire continent north of an irregular 
line passing through New York, Fort Wayne, 
Madison, Minneapolis, and Yankton lay, like 
the soil of Greenland in our time, buried beneath 
a bed of snow and ice some thousands of feet 
thick. The summits of the Adirondacks, the 
Catskills and the White Mountains barely 
emerged above the desolate, featureless waste. 

When we stand on the little heights 
of the Lowry Hill range, or when we 
build our homes upon them, and mar- 
vel that ice and water could transport 
such great masses of material, we 
should stop for a few moments and try 
to visualize the great ice and snow 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 125 

fields piled thousands of feet high over 
Loring Park and above Lowry Hill, 
and we should remember that they had 
been grinding away at the hills and 
valleys all the way from Duluth, and 
how much further we do not know, 
plowing and dragging along whatever 
soil or rock could be picked up in their 
interrupted progress. With this vast 
ice mass in mind, we may be able to 
appreciate the fact that Lowry Hill is 
merely a handful of incidental gravel - 
a bit of cosmic dust in the eye of crea- 
tion. The fact that this gravel dropped 
where it did and became Lowry Hill 
was merely a slight incident in the 
melting and subsidence of the ice sheet. 
The returning warmth found Loring 
Park very comfortably shut in by its 
little hills and fairly free to develop 
into the glorious and fertile valley that 
it became. Fanciful persons have 
thought to connect Noah's flood with 
the melting of this great ice deposit 
around the northern hemisphere of the 
planet. The supposition is not entirely 
foolish. Tradition might well have 



126 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

handed down a story from so terrific 
and overwhelming an inundation. 

As the ice melted more and more 
freely with the passing of the epoch, 
Loring Park was filled with water and 
debris. The lake soon began to define 
itself and the present features roughly 
to appear. And it was at this time that 
the birth of Lost Brook took place. I 
am told by those of the early settlers 
who had interest enough in the face of 
the earth to take casual notice, that the 
brook that flowed out of Johnson's 
Lake had cut steep banks through the 
high ground of the present Harmon 
Place north of the smaller lake. The 
lake at one time evidently filled the en- 
tire Loring Park basin to the Harmon 
Place rim, where the spillway of the 
rainy seasons must have been. This 
spillway cut deeper and deeper as time 
went on and as the floods came and 
went, until the brook had cut through 
the drift deposit where it flowed over, 
and had established itself a valley lead- 
ing to the Bassett's Creek lowlands, and 
so to the river. The deeper the cut, 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 127 

the lower the Loring Park lakes, until 
in the forties and fifties, when the white 
man arrived to settle there, the smaller 
lake had become a swamp and the 
greater lake was beginning to show 
some of the characteristics of a bog. 

When the Park Board of Minne- 
apolis secured the Central Park tract 
in 1883, the smaller lake was excavated 
from the old swamp and the great lake 
was considerably enlarged and its banks 
built up from the sediment taken out. 
Harmon Place forever dammed the 
Lost Brook which ceased to flow when 
the city's sewers cut the sources of the 
springs that fed the lakes. Hennepin 
Avenue's great bluff to the south was 
cut down, the bridge over the stream 
taken away and the street filled in. The 
entire valley of the Lost Brook soon 
disappeared and little trace of it is now 
to be found anywhere along its former 
course. 

The present form of this Hollow of 
the Hills, then, dates back to the time 
of our First Great Navigator. For we 
will assume that the great waters upon 



i 2 8 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

which Noah embarked with so much 
assurance were of the same general 
origin as those which laid down the 
glacial drift across the plateau upon 
which Minneapolis is built and which 
filled all this Lowry Hill valley rim- 
and-bank-full and to overflowing. The 
Loring Park of those mud and gravel 
banks, of the bowlders, and of the flot- 
sam and jetsam of the drift, was a sad 
sight and hopeless indeed in its desola- 
tion to one who did not trust God. Not 
a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass 
nor a struggling weed was to be found 
anywhere in this valley, nothing but 
water, mud, gravel banks, and bowl- 
ders. 

But life never dies nor can it be 
buried permanently in any tomb, even 
with thousands of feet of ice and mud 
piled above it. It feels no need of 
hurry in rolling away the stone and in 
accomplishing its resurrection. Time, 
we are told, is one of the forms of the 
sense consciousness, a form through 
which we are obliged to run our experi- 
ences to make them fit us properly. 






LORING PARK ASPECTS 129 

Life is not so circumscribed by cate- 
gories. Leisurely, and with the utmost 
freedom and deliberation of action, life 
took up the interrupted work in Loring 
Park and on the slopes of Lowry Hill, 
and the old manifestation, as old as 
God himself, began again. The seeds 
from the pyramids of the ice Pharaohs 
were ready to sprout when the condi- 
tions again became favorable. Birds 
from the southlands brought other 
needed seeds. Billions of benevolent 
germs drifted in with the summer 
winds and settled here to carry out 
their appointed tasks. The Spirit-that- 
Formed-This-Scene had its work well 
under way again in Loring Park before 
the ice and water were fairly gone. 

Life appears to be inherent every- 
where and ready to burst into manifes- 
tation when proper conditions are 
given, be they in a desert or in a human 
heart. Give the desert water and sun, 
and it blooms a garden. Give the heart 
love and a friend, and the valleys of dry 
bones are full of living men. 

Loring Park had everything life 



i 3 o LORING PARK ASPECTS 

could ask in the way of a stage for the 
unrollment of its great drama. And 
the scene shifters were now busy. If it 
were wilderness for which Moses was 
looking when he led the Children of 
Israel out of bondage, he could have 
found no more gloriously wild scene 
than Loring Park and Lowry Hill of- 
fered at the time of the Exodus. With 
poetic and constructive pleasure, we 
may dream of these long, unoccupied 
leisurely centuries that added their con- 
tributions of tree and soil. 

O ye green and happy woods, breathing like 
sleep! O safe and quiet population of these 
leafy places, dying brief deaths! O earth! O 
heavens, never uttering syllable to man! Is 
there no way to make known the meaning of 
your gentle silence, of your long, basking pleas- 
ures and brief pains? 

I know this Spirit that brooded over 
the face of Loring Park and Lowry 
Hill and that still broods, and I see and 
feel it at work and at rest everywhere. 
Often when walking through this liv- 
ing valley and climbing these gentle 
hills I find myself repeating the great 
lines that America's Homer wrote of 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 131 

the Platte Canyon in Colorado, and I 
find them applicable as well to Loring 
Park, to the valley of the Lost Brook, 
and to the simple and foolish little hills 
of the Lowry Range : 

Spirit that formed this scene 

. . . this naked freshness, 

These formless wild arrays . . . 

/ know thee, savage spirit -we have com- 
muned together 

. . . thou that revelest here - spirit that 
formed this scene. 



VI 

"DAD HOUGHTON" OF THE PLAZA 

WG. HOUGHTON, of the Plaza 
Hotel, Loring Park, strolled up 
and down Chestnut and Linden Ave- 
nues with two problems on his mind. 
While he was turning them over and 
back again, he presented to an observer 
the appearance of a man meditatively- 
regarding the smoky old houses that 
had been left by the receding tide when 
the city began to flow in a direction 
that its founders and pioneers had not 
foreseen. Cities have tricks of their 
own as to their ebbs and floods and the 
shrewdest of founders and owners are 
sometimes mistaken in their forecasts 
and are left so high and dry on the 
beach that even the spring tides fail to 
reach them. 

Mr. Houghton had been one of the 
luckiest operators in real estate and it 
had become his business -and his pleas- 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 133 

ure as well -to study urban growths and 
trends. At the age of fifty, and perhaps 
half a decade or more beyond it, he had 
accumulated in this way money and 
property of various kinds -but he was 
lonesome. And he noticed that this 
unpleasant state of mind was growing 
on him even faster than was his prop- 
erty. Books, gentleman farming, or art 
occupied the thoughts of some of his 
confreres who had money put away and 
mind and time to let, but Mr. Hough- 
ton kept to his old ways. Real estate 
was his "game." 

And then one day, to the astonish- 
ment of his friends at the Plaza and on 
Lowry Hill, his interest shifted to the 
ladies of the Cinderella Opera Com- 
pany. Now, as he strolled over a back- 
water section of the city, his mind was 
divided between the charm of their fly- 
ing skirts and the possibilities of profit- 
able investment. There was an electric 
line coming into the city that must log- 
ically find its terminal somewhere in 
this section. For a moment, considera- 
tion of the certainty of this fact drove 



i 3 4 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

the feminine garment from his inner 
eye. But it returned flauntingly. 

And now, look who's here! It's a 
lady and her name is Fate! And see 
what she does to us with her shep- 
herdess' hook that comes around our 
necks and changes our courses, controls 
our wandering steps, and brings us into 
line with her purposes, if she has any, 
or with her whims if she hasn't, and all 
in the flipping of a card or the twink- 
ling of a -stocking. 

For as Mr. Houghton walked, divid- 
ing the swift mind between these and 
those widely diverse matters, lo a half 
burned playing card lying, face down, 
on the sidewalk at his feet! Evidently 
enough someone had tried to destroy 
the cards and one of the deck, half con- 
sumed, had found its way into the street 
to play its little part in the sport of 
chance for awhile longer. 

"Hm," mused its victim, "I'll just 
pick YOU up for luck. If you're black, 
nothing doing on either. If you're red, 
then it's diamonds for the investment 
and it's hearts for the girls!" 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 135 

It was up to Fortune. The galled 
jade never winced. Mr. Houghton 
stooped over and picked up the charred 
half of the Jack of Hearts! Whether 
this luck was good or bad is as it may 
be. The facts remain to be collected 
into the story and the cards of the phi- 
losophers may go into the discard. Mr. 
Houghton crumbled off the charred 
portion of the pasteboard and put the 
half hearted card into his vest pocket 
on the top, right-hand side close to his 
bank book. 

"I've never had any fun at the Plaza 
or on Lowry Hill," he put the matter 
to himself, "and I'm going to run with 
this bunch of girls for awhile and see 
what there is in it." 

Long friendly in a business way with 
the manager of the house where the 
Opera Troupe was singing its way 
through a crowded week to full seats, 
Mr. Houghton had already found no 
great difficulty in passing the barriers 
and in meeting the girls in his easy way. 
Now as they saw more of him, they 
took to him naturally. In fact the 



136 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

whole troupe, male as well as female, 
liked him, and, as he played no favor- 
ites and seemed to want to give every- 
body concerned a good time, they soon 
began calling him "Dad" and other af- 
fectionately familiar names. The re- 
sult was that "Dad" Houghton became 
the angel of the company and actually 
followed it on its tour of a number of 
the larger cities. Others might wonder 
and conjecture, but their amazement 
and amusement did not trouble "Dad." 

"They're nice little women," he said 
to a friend who had expressed his sur- 
prise at Dad's new interest in life, "and 
I like to slip one or another of them a 
wrist watch or something now and then, 
or take them out to dinner. It lightens 
the work for them and it's some fun for 
me. What's the harm of this big fam- 
ily of mine if nobody's hurt but the 
neighbors' feelings?" 

So, during one of these empty morn- 
ings of a week when the troupe was 
playing at the Metropolitan, Mr. 
Houghton found that his mind was 
recurring to his former pursuits. He 






LORING PARK ASPECTS 137 

began again strolling about and ap- 
praising this section of Deacon Har- 
mon's old farm from which the city 
was obviously growing away. Among 
the houses that caught his wandering 
eye was a cottage or story-and-a-half 
house with ell, occupied by Mrs. Ma- 
hala Paull who was at this time en- 
gaged in sweeping the porch and 
looking out on the deserted street for 
someone to talk to. The front window 
of the house bore the legend "Rooms 
for Rent." 

"All the rooms taken?" ventured Mr. 
Houghton for the purpose of making 
talk with so quaint a relict of the street's 
vanished past. 

"Taken! I wish they were. Folks 
all seem to want to go out on Lowry 
Hill or towards the lakes. They won't 
stay down here." 

"A little out of the line of traffic, 
eh?" 

"We did think this was going to be 
one of the fine sections. Mr. Paull used 
to say that this place would make us 
well off if we could only hold on long 



138 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

enough. But I guess not now -not in 
my day." 

"You can't tell how soon or when 
things will turn around in a growing 
city. What have you got for rooms?" 

"There's this setting room with bed 
room in behind and three rooms in the 
upstairs and two in the ell." 

"Taxes pretty steep, I reckon." 

"They're awful. Sometimes I think 
I'll have to let them have the place. I 
approached the assessor some four or 
five years ago and he done the best he 
could for me. He used to know T. B. 
Paull. Everybody used to call my hus- 
band the 'Postle Paull and me his 
'Pistle. They would say, 'Here comes 
the 'Postle Paull and his 'Pistle,' but 
bless you, we didn't mind that." 

The old lady screwed up her face at 
the recollection of those happy days and 
then became sober again. 

"Here's our pictures in these old 1 da- 

1 The two daguerrotypes reproduced in this chap- 
ter form the mystery of the book. Many years ago, 
because of a love for this beautiful old art, they were 
purchased for a song at a Salvation Army store in 
Minneapolis. All attempts to identify them have so 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 139 

guerreotypes taken before we were 
married when Deacon Harmon lived 
up on the corner of Thirteenth Street 
and the Johnsons over by the swamp. 
Wasn't my husband a fine looking 
man? When he knew he was going to 
die with his disease, he began splitting 
up kindling wood for me. He had 
three rows piled as neat as wax across 
that cellar. It lasted me seven years." 
"You don't say so ! Well, Mrs. Paull, 
I am going to take that front room up 
stairs for a month and I rather think 
that I can fill the other rooms with the 
girls who are in the Opera Company at 
the theater if you don't mind the hours 
they keep. They have a few weeks' en- 
gagement in this town, I figure." 
"They're all right, ain't they?" 
"You know it! They are nice little 
women, about all of them — and work- 
ing hard for their pay. Of course 
there's the same mixture of good and 

far resulted in failure. The opinion of pioneers who 
have been consulted is that they were brought here 
from the East many years ago and that they represent 
persons who did not live in this vicinity. 



i 4 o LORING PARK ASPECTS 

bad in the theater business as there is 
in all lines of trade. We have to take 
them as they come." 

"I suppose so. Anyhow, it will be a 
great help." 

Dad Houghton talked with the girls 
at their late breakfast and before night 
he had four of them comfortably in- 
stalled in Mrs. Paull's rooms and the 
'Pistle running about in a flutter of 
pleased excitement. The cheaper ho- 
tels over .the stores along Hennepin 
Avenue and Seventh Street that the 
girls were accustomed to patronize 
were dingy and noisy. Mrs. Paull's 
house was home-like and quiet in com- 
parison. 

"This is Elsie Maltravers, Mrs. 
Paull," Dad was doing the honors of 
the occasion. "Of course that isn't her 
name, and Tricksie McCall and the 
Misses Geraldine French and Helen 
Homans." 

"I'm glad to have you all," replied 
Mrs. Paull, "thanks to Mr. Hough- 
ton." 

"Dad's worst vice is always wanting 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 145 

to be doing something for others," 
smiled Miss Maltravers at her hostess. 
"He wouldn't be happy if he wasn't. 
So he has found us this nice place." 

"He gave me this watch," broke in 
Miss Homans. "I'm almost thinking 
of leaving the profession for him." 

"You'd know it from his face," said 
Mrs. Paull, screwing up her eyes at 
them. 

"You're going pretty far," said Dad 
soberly but pleased nevertheless. "You 
better be getting settled in your rooms 
and if Mrs. Paull complains of you, 
you'll settle with me." 

"Isn't he hard?" sighed Miss Mal- 
travers. 

Mrs. Paull grew to like her cheerful, 
irresponsible charges so much and was 
so genuinely anxious to please and to do 
the little things for them, that they soon 
began calling her "Ma" and treating 
the place like home. Cheerful laugh- 
ter and snatches of song were common 
sounds about the lone Chestnut Avenue 
house and Dad Houghton felt that it 
was the life. 



146 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

Then in a few days Elsie came home 
bringing Mrs. Albert, who was play- 
ing an "elderly part" at the Schubert. 
Elsie had been thrown in with this ex- 
cellent actress before and had struck up 
a friendship with the older woman that 
went, when they were separated, even 
to the point of correspondence. And 
that, with the ladies of the stage, is far. 

Mrs. Albert was one of those vet- 
erans of the stage whom popularity, 
good repute, and a large measure of 
public affection had followed through 
her long career into her Indian Sum- 
mer. Her work for the season would 
close with the week and Elsie had per- 
suaded her to occupy a room at Mrs. 
Paull's for a few weeks before return- 
ing to her summer home on the coast. 

"Mrs. Albert," said Elsie impress- 
ively, "permit me to present Mr. 
Houghton, the Angel of the House and 
the best friend of our company." 

"I am much touched," responded 
Dad gallantly, "but I've always sup- 
posed that angels were ladies." 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 147 

"Perfect ladies," said Miss Mal- 
travers. 

"Not at all," said Mrs. Albert, "St. 
John's, you know, has excommunicated 
all the ladies from angelhood. It's 
only men who are angels now." 

"I'm sure of it," sighed Miss Ho- 
mans. 

Dad Houghton still held her hand 
and was regarding Mrs. Albert with a 
smile. 

"You were Etta Palmer and you 
were born in Farmington, Maine. I've 
always followed your career with in- 
terest. You don't remember me, but I 
was born there too." 

"My goodness, it's Willie Hough- 
ton," cried Mrs. Albert, shaking his 
hand vigorously. "I must have known 
you by a sort of inspiration, for nat- 
urally you have changed some in forty 
years." 

"I was twelve or fifteen years old 
when you left Farmington and went on 
the stage," said Dad. "We thought of 
you as one of the big girls then and I 



148 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

looked upon you with great awe and 
distant worship." 

"Oh girls," exclaimed Miss Mal- 
travers excitedly, "isn't this just lovely. 
Here they are united again after all 
these years! 

"Something will come of this I am 
sure," said Miss Homans, and the other 
girls murmured in concert. Dad 
Houghton was somewhat flustrated by 
this personal and intimate view of the 
matter, but Mrs. Albert was too good an 
actress to show any perturbation. The 
talk went into reminiscence, the refuge 
of the aged. 

Mrs. Albert fitted easily into the life 
of the house and enjoyed it. The girls 
were inclined to continue a semi-hu- 
morous personal view of the situation. 
Mrs. Albert and Dad were thrown 
much together and struck up a great 
friendship of the comfortable arm- 
chair and long conversational order. 
Seeing this, the girls became too sud- 
denly quiet. 

"Mrs. Albert," said Dad one evening 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 149 

as they sat before a little open fire, for 
the night was cool, "the girls think they 
have something on us." 

"Yes, the dear things, and it is a 
shame to disappoint them. The de- 
nouement will be a sad one for them." 

"It will indeed," grunted Dad sol- 
emnly. 

"They have been seeing aged ro- 
mance and hearing its sighing in this 
house ever since they discovered that I 
remembered you as a boy. But there 
is one thing more valuable to us now 
even than romance -'at our age,' to 
quote. And you know what that is as 
well as I do." 

"It is Human Freedom," said Dad, 
as dramatically as he was able to put 
it over with chest expanded and one 
arm aloft in the best Edwin Booth tra- 
dition. But the inspiration faded at 
once. 

"I do hope when I come to die," 
murmured Mrs. Albert unmoved, as 
she regarded the cheerful blaze in the 
grate, "that there will be a little open 



150 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

fire in the room. And I trust that you 
will not say that you hope that I may 
not go where there is a greater one." 

"I won't," replied Dad, "but it is 
too bad to disappoint the girls, isn't 
it?" 

"No, I don't think so," bridled Mrs. 
Albert. "They had no right to assume 
anything. I don't just like it." 

Dad was thoughtful for several mo- 
ments, gazing at the fire. 

"We might, if you'll excuse the ex- 
pression, put something across that 
might surprise them." 

Mrs. Albert looked up quickly. 
"Just what do you mean?" 

"Perhaps," said Dad thoughtfully, 
"you might call it a light society com- 
edy with you and me in the stellar 
roles." 

"Society comedy is my forte," said 
the mature actress. 

"My plot then is something like 
this," continued Dad, developing it in 
his mind as he went along, "though 
we'll have to rely on you to get in the 
correct touches and the-the-ATMOS- 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 151 

PHERE. (Dad listened to his own star 
word with evident pride.) I purpose 
setting the stage for the comedy they 
are expecting to see and then giving the 
play, but with the plot left out. Do 
you follow me?" 

"Suppose you unwind it a little fur- 
ther," smiled the actress. 

"Well," continued Dad, "the play 
opens with us giving, rather ostenta- 
tiously, a little family dinner here at 
this house, if we can get Mrs. Paull in 
on that, and I think we can. Everybody 
is invited. The assumption will be 
strong in the minds of these dear little 
busybodies that there is something do- 
ing then for sure." 

"I follow you. They will be looking 
for An Announcement." 

"They will. And they will be all 
ready with their 'I-knew-it-all-the- 
times,' their 'I-suspected-its,' their 
Ve-saw-it-from-the-very-firsts' and all 
the rest of them -and nothing will de- 
velop. It will be interesting to watch 
their faces through it all as the play 
goes on with Hamlet off somewhere 



152 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

fishing or nursing his problems in the 
seclusion of a bench in Loring Park." 

"Mr. Houghton," exclaimed the act- 
ress, "you have missed your vocation. 
You should really give us something to 
put on. I am old-fashioned now, I sup- 
pose, but I do think that the stage 
needs these quiet society comedies. We 
are too Noisymoving. I think that 
your idea in this case anyhow is de- 
lightful and workable. 

"It looks like an idea to me," said 
Dad, swollen with the pride of the 
amateur playright who has deposited 
his first egg. "We must get Mrs. Paull 
into it." 

The arrangements were easily made 
with the cheerful landlady. Mrs. Paull 
was enjoying the life like a girl. Chest- 
nut Avenue had not been so full of life 
since the seventies. 

"I will provide the materials for the 
feast," said Dad after he had inter- 
viewed Mrs. Paull, "and you girls may 
cook 'em up and frame up the table to 
your own taste. Get what extras you 
need and leave the expense to me." 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 153 

And so on the day of the great event, 
Dad came riding up to the house on the 
grocery delivery wagon much larger 
than life and with a brace of young but 
massive turkeys, several lobsters from 
Shiek's, bunches of asparagus, heads of 
lettuce, young onions, boxes of straw- 
berries, bottles of olive oil, and a few 
other necessities that he had happened 
to get an eye upon. 

"Land sakes!" exclaimed the aston- 
ished Mrs. Paull, peering over her 
glasses at the array upon the kitchen 
table. 

Dad Houghton was now in his ele- 
ment. On the back porch he "shucked 
the lobsters" for the salad and sniffed 
appreciatively at the odors of roasting 
turkey that came through the windows 
of the busy kitchen. 

"Land sakes!" said Mrs. Paull again, 
"this will overwhelm the girls." 

"I hope so," said Dad, "there's grow- 
ing up here a square meal that is cal- 
culated to satisfy the most worldly- 
minded." 

"The girls will be going out to 



154 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

breakfast about now," and the land- 
lady. "Trifling time away in bed all 
morning! I never could do that if I 
was out all hours. I suppose now- 
here comes Elsie. Good mornin', Miss 
Maltravers." 

The little actress smiled in at the 
door in passing. The others drifted 
leisurely down. 

"Oh how good you smell!" 

"I dunno about dishes," observed 
Mrs. Paull, somewhat perturbed, "but 
I guess, somehow-" 

"If the dishes fail, some of us will 
have to double up, that's all," said Dad. 
"They're used to it, ain't you girls? 
And they are willing to do most any- 
thing for a real home meal, huh?" 

The eventful dinner hour came and 
started itself off in the jolliest manner. 
Little snatches of song broke in on it. 
Dad told his best stories. Miss Ho- 
mans related her troubles with a recent 
admirer who had sent her flowers and 
had haunted the stage door in the alley 
off Fourth Street. 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 155 

"I told him to chase himself/' said 
the lady, "but he said he had a rheu- 
matic knee." 

Miss Homans had delightful red 
hair of the shade that artists rave about 
and story writers call "Titian." 

"I think it's wonderful," sighed 
Elsie when the conversation "switched" 
to Miss Homans' locks -such a verb is 
pardonable in this connection surely. 

"It's just red hair and that is all that 
there is about it," protested Miss Ho- 
mans. "It's not nearly so wonderful 
as yours." 

Miss Maltravers had the sort of red 
hair that goes invariably with a clear 
complexion but which is not always ap- 
preciated by its owner. 

"As for that," broke in Dad, mis- 
chievously, "you can secure either of 
them at Circler's. Miss Homans' is a 
dollar and seventy-five a bottle and I 
don't just know what Miss Maltravers' 
comes to now. But it's not prohibi- 
tive." 

"Mine is the most expensive of all," 



156 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

sighed Mrs. Albert, "for time is money 
and it takes sixty years to produce my 
kind." 

Mrs. Paull told the story of her 
lucky penny and affirmed that she 
never could doubt it again. Attempts 
were made to borrow it, but she refused 
all demands. 

The girls now began looking expect- 
antly at their host and hostess. Mrs. 
Albert wore a half humorous and a 
self-conscious look and now and then 
she simpered a little and bridled per- 
ceptibly with that exquisite art that has 
delighted us for so long. Dad had an 
important and impressive cast of coun- 
tenance as of a man with a weighty 
secret on his mind. 

Then when the chairs were pushed 
back, Dad arose impressively, cleared 
his throat, used his handkerchief mild- 
ly, seemed to find his hands somewhat 
in the way, finally put them in his 
pockets and to a very attentive circle of 
listeners he began : 

"Ladies and gentlemen -the latter 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 157 

being myself -I have something of an 
announcement to make- 

(Thrills, visible and evident!) 
that I suppose, will be something of a 
surprise to you." 

"Not a bit of it!" This interruption 
was from Miss Maltravers. 

"No? Then I have not kept my 
secret as well as I thought. But, how- 
ever, I will go on. I have something 
of an announcement to make, seeing 
that our happy home here is to be brok- 
en up, something of my own plans that 
may be of interest to my dear girls here 
and to Mrs. Albert as well-" 

"Oh, Dad, no surprise to her I am 
sure." This from Miss Homans. 

"I am not so sure of that, my girl. 
Well, as I was saying when interrupted, 
I have an announcement to make re- 
garding my own activities this summer 
which I hope you or some of you will 
have an interest in when we may hope 
to meet again, if the Cinderella Opera 
Company holds together- and I be- 
lieve it will. Hm. Let me see, where 



158 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

was I ? Oh yes, I remember. Well, my 
announcement is that I propose this 
summer devoting some time to the 
composing of a play- a sort of light 
comedy in which I hope you or some 
of you will possibly have parts when it 
is presented on the boards. We have 
been so long together this season that I 
felt sure you would be interested in my 
little disclosure even if you have no 
confidence in my ability to put it over. 
That's about it, I guess. God bless you 
all and give you jolly times this sum- 
mer and here's to our meeting again 
next season." 

Dad raised his glass of water and 
looked out composedly on the disap- 
pointment of the ladies' small circle. 

"You don't think I can do it, ha?" 

"Oh, oh yes, surely you can!" "No 
doubt about it at all." "I'm sure you 
can!" These were some of the cries 
that arose upon the turkey-tainted air. 
Mrs. Albert smiled composedly and 
Dad was quite complaisant as the sub- 
ject was tossed to and fro. 

"I was hoping for something else, 






LORING PARK ASPECTS 159 

though," sighed Miss Maltravers fin- 
ally. The others murmured. 

So the dinner broke up in happy con- 
fusion and many hands made light 
work of what Mrs. Paull called "the 
mess." 

The girls had gone and the house 
was rather lonesome. Mrs. Albert was 
going tomorrow and Dad was figuring 
on getting back to his lonesome rooms 
in the Plaza and to the garish lights of 
Loring Park just as soon as he could 
make up his mind on the matter of ad- 
vising Mrs. Paull about her real estate 
in which he had been taking an inter- 
est. At least that was the excuse he 
now gave for staying on. 

Dad and Mrs. Albert were sitting 
before the open grate again in which 
burned the merest apology for a sum- 
mer fire "to take off the dampness of 
the house." 

"It all comes to ashes at last," mused 
Mrs. Albert not so uncheerfully as the 
remark sounds in print. 

"Yes," said Dad, "and the dust 



i6o LORING PARK ASPECTS 

thrown in. They always go together in 
books, you know. The firm of Dust & 
Ashes is an old and respectable house 
and it's as sound as the First and Se- 
curity National Bank." 

"Those poor girls/' sighed Mrs. Al- 
bert. "I was rather sorry for them 
after all. They had their minds simply 
set on us." 

"I know it," replied Mr. Houghton. 
"It was almost wrong for us to do it, 
but they brought it on themselves." 
There was a pause while the fire 
burned. "Mrs. Albert," resumed Dad 
meditatively, "what do you think of re- 
marriage anyhow?" 

"Now," said the fine actress, "if 
you're honest and not joking, I will tell 
you freely that it has always stood to 
me as the Great Temptation. But I 
have had the sense to keep the house of 
my heart for twenty-five years under 
lock and key- and the key thrown 
away." 

Dad sighed a real estate sigh. 

"You're right, of course. With us 
who have been married, the thing's 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 161 

done. But, as you say, it's a tempta- 
tion. Time gets lonesome." 

"Deliver us from temptation," said 
Mrs. Albert piously. "There are worse 
things than lonesomeness." 

"Mrs. Albert," mused Dad, knock- 
ing a bit of the burning wood with the 
poker, "supposing you should find that 
lost key some time and should open up 
the house again, which do you suppose 
would come out- the lady or the tiger?" 

Mrs. Albert dropped a stitch and 
carefully picked it up again before re- 
plying. Then she drew the yarn out 
at arm's length to loosen it from the 
ball. 

"I wonder!" 



VII 



CAMPING OUT IN HEAVEN 

THE difficult question, "Why should 
there be anything anywhere," pro- 
pounded, I believe, by William James 
in a moment of philosophical humor, is 
one of the first to challenge us on the 
surface when we are strolling in Lor- 
ing Park. Why should there be any- 
thing here, or why should there be any- 
thing anywhere? It is no small prob- 
lem. Then, too, here is all this noble 
and satisfying beauty, with delightful 
slopes of lawn wooded hills, forest 
glades, sheets of silent water mirror- 
ing the still trees by day and the quieter 
stars by night. Is all this merely on 
the surface? Is there no hidden mean- 
ing to it all, no underlying and more 
permanent reality? 

Many years ago I consulted a sup- 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 163 

posedly learned man on this matter. 
He had an easy answer when he finally 
discovered the problem that was worry- 
ing the immature mind of the question- 
er? It was all merely Nature. It just 
happened that there was something 
somewhere. He found it just as easy 
to have something as to have nothing. 
Something simply always was -that was 
all there was to it and nothing to worry 
about either. 

I was contented with this solution at 
first but in time I became dissatisfied 
with it. Why should there be any Na- 
ture, whatever it was? Why should it 
just happen that there was something 
where one naturally might have expect- 
ed to find nothing? 

In studying the ways in which the 
substances that make up the materials 
of this something settle into form, or 
crystallize, if left to themselves, it is 
found that they take these remarkable 
geometrical shapes in accordance with 
mathematical law. There is no chance 
about it, no "just happening." Matter 
is all shot through and through with 



164 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

law, is governed by law and is held by 
law everywhere. The simplest con- 
sideration of crystallography shows that 
matter, by the operation of molecular 
attraction, assumes definite structure 
with forms of solids enclosed by plane 
surfaces arranged according to the laws 
of mathematics. How can this as- 
tounding thing just happen? Here 
seems to be plain enough evidence of 
the workings of infinite mathematical 
Mind, and so tremendous a Mind does 
it appear to be from its works that I 
do not hesitate to allow it the compli- 
ment of the capital letter. In Loring 
Park you are treading on forces, laws, 
mathematics, and formulas with ev- 
ery careless step, and you are simply 
compelled to say "God." And then, 
there is life in the park too, more won- 
derful and mysterious, even, than the 
mathematical planes bounding crys- 
tals -and much more interesting and 
fascinating. For this little life that we 
see with our eyes and feel in our 
breasts may well be, in some way, the 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 165 

reflection of the great Life of the Uni- 
verse. 

So the first thing you may say to 
yourself, if so disposed, when you walk 
in Loring Park in the cool of the day, 
is -"God." It is all God, every tree 
and shrub is a burning bush, burning 
with the living fire, and the place is 
Holy Ground. 

Other persons by their natural and 
spontaneous abilities have even less 
difficulty in finding God in Loring 
Park. I once asked a wise woman, 
trying in my childish way to puzzle 
her and, incidentaly, to show a cer- 
tain fascinating and superior brillian- 
cy of mind, "Why should there be any- 
thing here?" and she declared at once 
and offhand, that there wasn't -not a 
thing here, not a thing anywhere, only 
just God. 

"Then," I countered, somewhat non- 
plussed and a little piqued, "What is 
Loring Park?" And, as one who had 
been there from the first and who was 
in the secret of all its secrets, she ex- 



1 66 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

plained that Loring Park was just 
made up of laws, forces, life, beauty, 
truth, love, and what-nots of similar 
variety. The outside of it that we saw 
with our eyes was phenomenal merely, 
the result of our material sensory ap- 
paratus. If we saw it as it really is, we 
should see infinite Life, infinite Beau- 
ty, infinite Power, infinite Law, and in- 
finite Love. 

Perhaps she is half right. These 
things seem to be more necessary to 
happiness as we appear to advance in 
years, and they seem to be lying around 
in Loring Park in infinite abundance. 

That simple philosopher Kant, by 
an irreverent American referred to as 
the Koenigsberg Bantam, and whose 
books we doubtless carry in our pockets 
to read in our leisure moments on the 
street cars that run through the Loring 
Park valley, would have delighted in 
the assertion that we do not see Loring 
Park as it is in itself, but under the 
guise of appearances which the sense 
organs unavoidably impose. The in- 
habiters of some of the planets may 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 167 

well see their Loring Parks quite oth- 
erwise from the way in which we see 
our's. Outside Nature "exists only for 
sense beings. The worlds of sense may 
be very different according to the dif- 
ferences of sense perceptions in various 
world beholders while the world of un- 
derstanding which lies at the founda- 
tion remains always the same." 

The outside Loring Park, then, with 
the rest of the sense world, is, in this 
philosophy, "nothing more than a mere 
appearance, ... a picture which 
hovers before our present modes of 
knowing and, like a dream, has no real- 
ity in itself." 

But even granting for a moment that 
all these things are so, yet there re- 
mains the great phenomenon, the sen- 
sory illusion, the splendid stage setting 
of Loring Park as we see it in our im- 
perfect way. What romances and 
stories it has told ! What tragedies and 
dramas of life and death have played 
themselves out on its stage! What a 
theater it offers for splendid and im- 
mortal adventure! 



168 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

And what wonderful adventurers we 
all are! Every living person, if he has 
mind enough to dramatize ordinary 
events or to estimate them properly 
when they are unrolled before him and 
while he unrolls with them, is living a 
life of most extraordinary adventure. 
All possibilities lie in the way of one 
who is merely crossing the Loring Park 
valley. 

In the early nineties I was a great 
wanderer within that small section of 
the face of the earth known to Hud- 
son's "Dictionary of Minneapolis" as 
"the city limits." No portion of it held 
greater charm than the rim of hills be- 
ginning west of Bryn Mawr and run- 
ning easterly till they lose themselves 
in the prairies east and south of the 
former W. D. Washburn residence. 

The first breach in this range of hills 
was made when the Lowry bluff was 
cut down to allow Hennepin Avenue 
to run through. The first railroad 
made use of the natural opening west of 
the Lowry hill. Last of all came the 







Si 

o 
U 



< 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 171 

cutting through of the Bryn Mawr hill 
to allow Superior Avenue a direct 
route to Minnetonka. 

One unoccupied Sunday in those 
years when the section where Superior 
Avenue leaves the valley was as wild 
a country as it was when Joseph S. 
Johnson cultivated the land of his Lor- 
ing Park farm, I wandered up into 
these "Little Hills" which, I believe, 
is the translation of the words "Bryn 
Mawr," and found, squatting in a little 
opening in the woods on the hillside 
looking out over the valley, a small 
colony of campers from the city. When 
I close my eyes now, the sunshine of 
those days all comes flooding back 
again, with the reds and browns of the 
sumacs, the black boles of the oak trees, 
and the rich greens of field and foli- 
age -and I am standing looking down 
into Camp Comfort again. You would 
look for the site today in vain. The 
gravel man has dug the entire hill and 
valley away and used the material for 
the roofs of buildings. The sand of 
"the eternal hills" has been combined 



172 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

with the cement of commerce for vari- 
ous other serviceable purposes. Camp 
Comfort is a memory only, but I know 
on what screen all that old glory of 
sunlight and summer, that wild beat- 
ing of wind and rain, those long nights 
of leafy murmur and of insect orches- 
tration still are shown. 

I soon formed a real and living ac- 
quaintance with the three occupants of 
the little tent in the hills and became a 
constant night and day visitor. This 
acquaintance grew and, ripened until I 
pitched my tent there for weeks at a 
time and took a living part in the fight 
for life that made these hills for the 
campers a stern and rather terrible bat- 
tle-ground. But it is all past now. The 
battle was lost and won. All, all are 
gone, the old familiar faces -and evert 
the eternal hills are gone. 

After living on.a bit of land for some 
time, one may discover much of inter- 
est about it. That all the land of these 
hills had been "laid out" into city lots 
and sold to customers here, there, and 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 173 

everywhere, neither we who were en- 
camped here, nor the birds, the flowers, 
the stones, and the trees for a moment 
suspected. A day came at length that 
revealed the facts. A gentle and cul- 
tured w 4 oman from the East wandered 
into the camp looking for the corner of 
two uninhabited streets that appeared 
on the map*, but which were not appar- 
ent on earth. Some years before, she 
had purchased, "sight unseen" as the 
boys once said when swapping jack- 
knives, a lot of land in this vicinity. 
Here was the whole wide world spread 
out before us, and she claimed to hold 
fifty unincumbered front feet of it as 
her own personal property, her very 
own! 

We knew in a general way where the 
streets should have run if there had 
been any, and we led her to the spot. 
At the sight of the "impenetrable for- 
est," the wind flowers, the trilliums, and 
the undisturbed surface of the planet 
generally, she threw up both hands and 
spoke in milder terms than I should 
have done of the perfidy of man and 



174 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

especially of that section of mankind 
engaged in the real estate business. She 
had paid one thousand, two hundred 
dollars for fifty front feet of this forest 
which the map showed to be not so far 
distant from the geographical center of 
the city. The real estate man (and he 
was a "personal friend") in negotiating 
the sale of the land to his distant cus- 
tomer, had neglected to mention the 
railroad tracks and other minor matters 
of a similar nature tending to keep pop- 
ulation at a distance. 

Among the mysterious things that 
caught our attention in this little open- 
ing in the woods were two abandoned 
and almost overgrown excavations that 
had the appearance of old basements 
of long forgotten houses. We were 
deeply interested in the discovery and 
it was some time before we ascertained 
that we were camping in the front- 
yard, or back-yard, or door-yard, or 
barn-yard of the old Michael Hallo- 
ran claim. 

Four brothers, Michael, Patrick, 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 175 

John, and Thomas Halloran, came 
from County Cork, Ireland, in the fif- 
ties and took up land from the govern- 
ment around the Lake of the Isles, west 
of the present Cedar Lake Road ad- 
joining Bryn Mawr and in North Min- 
neapolis. Their descendants still live 
here, some of them on the old claims. 
The struggles and triumphs of their 
sturdy forbears would fill a book. It 
is a family record that some of these 
descendants should put down on paper 
while the facts and traditions are still 
available. 

One dead of night, lying half asleep 
in the white tent through which the 
moonlight filtered dimly, I listened in 
some trepidation to a strange halting 
approach, now silent, now renewed, 
like the hesitant movements of some 
ancient ghost of the place. It ad- 
vanced, stopped, came on, halted, then 
advanced again till it reached the tent. 
Then all was silent. The bull terrier 
gave hoarse growls at intervals, and 
then a gruff half bark or two. He 



176 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

trembled violently, shaking the floor of 
the tent perceptibly, but he did not of- 
fer to go out and he refused to accept 
our advice to that end. As nothing 
more came of the mysterious visitor, 
we soon dropped to sleep again. 

In the morning I noticed with some 
distaste that an ancient reptile of a tur- 
tle had settled himself comfortably un- 
der the tent in the wet sand in which 
we had buried the jar of butter to keep 
it cool. This grateful coldness was ap- 
preciated by the turtle as well as by the 
butter. In some strange way, occult 
to us, he had detected this cool spot 
from a distance and had come to dem- 
onstrate the reason for his strange in- 
ner confidence. That is turtle "faith." 
If only our own human faith in things 
unseen may obtain a parallel demon- 
stration! 

We were unreasonably disturbed by 
the thought of this innocent reptile 
crouched beside the family butter no 
matter how carefully it was covered, 
and we finally collected him in a bas- 
ket and bore him far away. But he 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 177 

returned. It became necessary, final- 
ly, to transport him as far as Cedar 
Lake and there he was content to re- 
main. 

A solemn toad went through the 
same performance and had to be car- 
ried a long distance away in order to 
discourage his inevitable return. 

The only treetoad I ever saw made 
his home with us between the tent and 
the fly and sang his heart out for our 
benefit. He was a strange and shy 
creature, but we felt that rapture must 
be at the heart of him and he was a 
welcome boarder. 

A splendid girl on horseback one 
afternoon galloped up the Cedar Lake 
Road, came across the fields, and tied 
her horse to a tree on the hilltop. Be- 
fore long the leading man in the un- 
written drama appeared on the scene. 
They met as lovers and talked long and 
earnestly together at the edge of the 
woods. And then she rode away across 
the field, waving back to him a farewell 
with her long, streaming veil. He 



178 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

stood and watched her. We could see 
them through the screen of the boles 
of the trees. 

Many a romance we wove from this 
delightful incident. The reality could 
be no more fascinating than our per- 
haps more dramatically perfect tragi- 
comedies of life built on its slight 
foundation. 

But though the glorious summers 
came and went at Camp Comfort and 
we came and went with them like the 
birds, and though this university of the 
hills was teaching us many things, not 
the least among them the strange phe- 
nomenon that the flowers of love often 
blossom their sweetest on the edges of 
graves, nevertheless, all was not going 
well at Camp Comfort. 

"How can you possibly know of 
things so palpably in the future," I 
asked the Lady of the Hills as we sat 
for long stretches of hours on the brow 
of the little mountain, looking out over 
the skyline of the city and beyond it 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 179 

into distant spaces and fast coming 
days. 

One might as well have asked the 
migrating bird, born that summer, of 
the monitions in its little heart of the 
certainty of the coming winter. 

So the perfect days unrolled them- 
selves in our little valley until, one ear- 
ly autumn day, a bird flew in at the 
tent opening, fluttered a moment, and 
flew away. And not long after that 
omen, it became apparent to us all that 
"the latest strife was lost and all was 
done with." 

After the others had gone, I re- 
mained alone in the hills all of that 
quiet Sunday afternoon until evening. 
The night came on and the lonesome- 
ness became so profound that, full of 
heaviness, I wandered down through 
the glen towards the Bryn Mawr val- 
ley. Coming out of the woods, I 
looked across this Hollow of the Hills 
along the dusk of the north side of the 
Lowry range, with its friendly stars of 
houselights among the trees, and there, 



180 LORING PARK ASPECTS 

on the far eastern horizon line of the 
valley, shone out the Cross of Light on 
the top of the spire of the Wesley 
Church at the corner of First Avenue 
south and Grant Street, far away but 
very hopeful and bright. It hung 
towering not only o'er the wrecks of 
time in the Loring Park valley, but 
over the living and ever renewed crea- 
tions of the mysterious life that is all 
the time making all things all over 
new again and better than they have 
been before. 

So I have come to regard this dear 
valley in another and a far different 
light from the things that seem to be 
"passing away." If the material ap- 
pearance before our eyes, the setting 
and the shifting of the scenery for our 
little tragi-comedies of life and death, 
is so beautiful, what must be the real- 
ity back of it all when the play is over 
and the audience has gone home? If 
Loring Park is separated by "a discrete 
degree" from the unknown reality of 
itself, the "doctrine of correspondence" 
that goes with these degrees gives us 



LORING PARK ASPECTS 181 

many hints of an underlying Loring 
Park which might easily furnish, for 
one who drops his sense consciousness 
only to exchange it for a deeper pene- 
tration and perception, as satisfactory 
a heaven as any of which we may con- 
ceive. 

The original meaning of the word 
"paradise" is "park." With mortal 
and fading eyes we look out upon Lor- 
ing Park, but if we look through it and 
a little deeper, or perhaps higher, we 
may well be directing our unanxious 
gaze across the very Plains of the 
Blessed. Through this long night of 
Time, we catch glimpses of "edges" 
and "bordering lights." 



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